Today was back at it for my D.S. project! A series of a 3 hard working days leading up to the session on Wednesday.

The first element I had to focus on was making sure the background vocals were appropriately tuned for the arrangement of “My Life”. Shanaya sent me these stems which she recorded from her home studio, and I wanted to make sure they fit in nicely with the lead vocals she tracked at Humber. To do this, I used Melodyne, which I am starting to get the hang of! 

Quick tip for Melodyne – when you have transferred the data, hit command A to select all notes, and then double click to match them to the nearest note. This isn’t always perfect, so I would recommend going back and checking how accurate it is, but generally I find it to be a good starting point!

Next, I went back to drum sample editing. As mentioned from Saturday, I was having difficulty getting the samples to sound the way I intended, so I decided to use my electronic kit to re-track instead.

Here were the steps I used to get my drum kit samples:

• Step 1: Export a mix from Pro Tools with no original recorded drums
• Step 2: Import this mix into Logic as an audio file
• Step 3: Create a new drum kit designer MIDI track in Logic
• Step 4: Record overtop of the mix which has no drums
• Step 5: Separate the parts of the drum kit into separate MIDI tracks
• Step 6: Choose which cymbal sounds you would like to have
• Step 7: Remove drum kit designer plugin from kick, snare, and toms
• Step 8: Add SSD plugin to kick
• Step 9: Load the sample into sampler
• Step 10: Map the snare to the correct MIDI note
• Repeat steps 8-10 for snare + toms

After I finished this, I now had a new drum performance layered in with my percussion track. 

I finished my day by attending a great songwriting session with Mountain Springs! We wrote a new song called “Fixed on You”, which I will be helping produce in the future. On my way home from the songwriting session, I stopped in at the Casbah weekly open jam. I bumped into my friend Joe and Lance, and we performed a few Chris Stapleton songs! A great way to end a productive day.