Project 1 Reflection 2 - Synths & Backing

With the drums done Blake and I started to look more into the synths. Starting with a sawtooth dr dre styled "whistle" we then played around with the sound a little bit from that. There are 2 lead synths and 2 bass elements to this song, the moving bass is a kontact bass plugin.

On my own I set about planning the baseline track in Logics ES2, it sounded fairly tight and not very bouncy. In the Raven studio, using the base track as a guideline Blake and I re worked the sound of the synth, it was more powerful but I felt it still needed some kind of motion. After inputting the raw audio from the moog I realised that it was a bit too harsh on the hits of the notes so I added an auto-filter plugin with a long attack (300ms) that pulls the synth back into the mix.

The first bass synth is a Kontact plugin bass synth that has realistic ties between notes that give an element of a real bass guitar. The other bass synth is a simple sine synth that adds extra volume on the beat, this gives the song a flow.

The synths were a little harder for me to ascertain a direction with, as Hip Hop is not my area of speciality but I am fairly happy with the outcome.

Looking back I would definitely need a reference track in the future, as this project was a blend of genres. Originally there was too much going on in the mix, too many synth elements that took over the song and left no room for the vocals so by the time we got around to the vocals it was harder to fit them in to the mix. I will structure songs with vocal presence in mind in the future. I've lowered the volume of all the synths and the drums in order to stop the over compression of the synths (Vocals are side chained)