This week's song, "Slow Fall" has a kind of fun production thing mixed super super low and I thought I'd just quickly break down.
It was late after one of Kendrick Lamar’s O2 dates and I really wanted to do some quirky production nonsense. I was heavily inspired by a video David Maxim-Micic made about how he creates his own synths. You can watch the process in the video below, but in short, he samples and manipulates glasses in his kitchen to create totally new synth instruments.
After seeing this, I wanted to see if I could achieve something to a similar affect, which led me to think of the drum cymbals. I decided to do one set of normal EQs on the cymbals, but then duplicate all of the tracks. On these duplicates, I’d take out everything except a specific frequency that corresponded to a single note. Because there were three mics (hihat, overhead left, overhead right), I picked 3 notes: D, E, F#, corresponding to where they were panned from left to right. These three notes fit into all the chords of the song (Bm, A, G, Em7, F#m7) and brought out different harmonic qualities when clashed against them.
The reason I believe this was effective was mainly the dynamic element of it. The “cynth” corresponds with the drumming, so the intensity of the sound matches the overall dynamics of the piece.
You can take a listen to a rough isolated bounce (complete with rushed, awful spelling) I did a while back in this little Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qXuhnffZlbCvFEp_NKH8QsY89kZbh0qM
So yeah! This blog isn’t full of any insight or commentary or really anything hugely constructive, but this was a fun thing about the track that I wanted to highlight.
Peace!