Making Sausage #2
Behind the scenes of "Found My Forever"
Kristen did a great job describing the context of this project, so I won’t fully re-hash it here. But I’ll be explaining some more of the technical aspects of the production process.
We were asked several month ago by one of our karaoke singers (Lisa) if we could write a song for her about her husband, she said she already had lyrics and just needed some music to go with those. It turned out that her “lyrics” were actually her wedding vows, which needed significant re-wording into a singable form. While I set Kristen on figuring out that part, I put on my Producer Hat and worked on a plan for the overall sound.
Since we know pretty well the types of music that she likes and sings well, I decided on something like a soft-pop track with a hip-hop style beat. I tested various combinations of chord progressions, instruments, and beats.
For a pop chord progression, well, you can’t go wrong with the old standby, the 1-5-6-4 in C major (I-V-vi-IV). It’s familiar, and the chords are easy to play on both a piano keyboard and a guitar.
I’m not a virtuoso player of either piano or guitar, so I just let the computer do the work. Pretty basic piano sound and rhythm with Captain Chords. Added some reverb.
91 bpm sounded about right, and I selected a lo-fi hip-hop beat from the 600GB of samples and loops I’ve collected.
On top of that I layered an acoustic guitar melody (via the Melody Sauce 2 plugin), some delay/echo with Replika, and it made a nice tinkle over the piano and beat.
After after a few hours of work, Kristen had some lyrics, and she came up with an excellent vocal melody live, off the cuff - just singing the lyrics in time with the music I’d sequenced. I loved the look on her face when she finished the first take. She was stunned and exclaimed “I didn’t know I could do that!” Of course, I never doubted her for a minute.
Kristen wasn’t entirely satisfied with the vocals though, so after a brief break we did a second take and she pitched up a little higher to more closely imitate Lisa’s vocal style.
Here’s the demo song with Kristen’s second take:
At this point I was seriously impressed with how quickly we’d pulled this together, maybe six hours of work.
Lisa immediately loved the demo, so we scheduled a time for her to come to my studio and record. She was a bit nervous but we did four takes and I sent her a second demo. Which she wasn’t entirely happy with. So, we did another session with four more takes.
Russ, Lisa’s husband, also asked for “violins” and I added some strings to the instrumental portions of the song. The fourth take from the second session was definitely the best - so the final track is mostly that vocal, with one portion of the fourth take from the first session. The vocals in the chorus are doubled with the chorus sections from the third take of the second session. I used VocAlign Project 5 to get the second vocal track precisely lined up.
Lisa also wanted “more bass”, no problem, I just dialed up the Tight Punch in bx_subfilter on the master bus. The rest of the mastering chain includes bx_masterdesk Classic and Ozone 11.
Of course, I’ve glossed over some of the precise details but this is the basic process we followed. Also, Lisa made a few changes to the lyrics herself.
And then, just over two weeks from the day we started writing the song, we released it.
You can hear the final result on your favorite music platform.
Overall this was about 20-25 hours of work in total. I am a fan of working quickly, and I realize that there will always be something that could be done better or at least differently. But finished is better than perfect, and I’m happy with the result.
That said, there are a few things that I will probably do differently on my next track given the experience with this one. Like Kristen said, we are here to create… so now it’s on to the next project!
You never cease to amaze me. ✨️