Sans Metronome

I mentioned in my last blog post that I’d recorded some drums at the end of October and was slowly building up a song. I’ve finally finished it and am absolutely stoked with the result! 🎉

I’m terrible at coming up with names for songs especially because none of mine have vocals, so I titled this one “Sans Metronome” since that was the whole thing to begin with (I fired up Logic Pro and just started playing the drums, without any explicit tempo set and no metronome). Pleasingly, I also subsequently realised that I actually broke the song up with minor fills every two bars and a larger one every fourth bar without even thinking about it so it flowed pretty naturally. I had bought the incredible Superior Drummer 3 plugin (at a significant discount from its RRP during their Black Friday sale, I should clarify 😅) and spent a fair bit of time getting my head around it, but otherwise didn’t do much of anything else with the song until the start of December when I was finally inspired enough to build on it.

I started by nicking Deb‘s general chord progression from I’m Staying Home This Christmas (the key was G Major with a I IV V I progression, so G C D G and the occasional Am thrown in) and once I had that, I began with the bass line which started as a very simple and uninteresting set of quarter-note triads that I deleted and redid with a faster and more interesting feel once I started recording the rhythm guitar section. After that it started coming together more quickly, I recorded the lead guitar part piece by piece with my Stratocaster which also ended up getting deleted and rerecorded with a faster pace, which then brought on some more changes to some of the parts of the bass guitar.

One of the things in music in general I’m a big fan of is the kind of “wall of sound” effect where there are just layers and layers of sound, and I wanted to try to recreate that a little bit with this song too. I used Logic Pro’s built-in “Alchemy” synthesiser plugin, manually wrote in the MIDI notes to match the lead guitar (this is the one part of the song I didn’t actually play on an instrument myself), and then had far too much fun mucking around with the twelve gajillion presets to see what sounded good. Originally I had a bells sort of sound for the choruses but on listening back to it, it sounded too Christmasy so I ditched that and went for a bit of a more pronounced synth pad sound similar to what I had done for the rest of the song, one that more floats in the background rather than particularly drawing attention to itself.

And then finally one of the really key parts once you’re done recording is mastering! One of the features that Apple introduced in a recent Logic Pro update is the Mastering Assistant:

Mastering Assistant is a plug-in designed to make your final mix sound great across any playback device. By meticulously analyzing audio, it automatically fine-tunes the sound through dynamic adjustments, precisely balanced frequency corrections, and additional sonic enhancements. Mastering Assistant also provides dynamic processing and spectral shaping inspired by boutique analog hardware devices used by professional mastering engineers

I fired that up and it did a great job, but I also paid careful attention to the relative sound levels of each track, and actually ended up cranking the volume down for almost everything to some degree, tweaked the sounds of the snare drum and ride cymbal to make them less and more pronounced respectively, and just generally really listened with a critical ear to make sure everything sounded correct and sat well together. I made sure to listen not just on my Audio Technica headphones that I normally use, but also through my Blackstar guitar amp that has a 3.5mm input, our HomePod, and through our big speakers plus subwoofer in the lounge room. The latter three were really interesting because they made me realise I needed to make some more tweaks to get the track sounding good.

And now finally after many hours of work, it’s finished. 🎉 I’m probably not going to do another one of these particularly soon, especially since I’m back at work tomorrow after having had three weeks off and loads of time to fiddle around, but I’m feeling a lot more confident now! 😁