Today, I was grateful to have another private lesson with Tom Ionescu. We discussed a few topics, specifically reviewing my D.S. mixes, as well as my drum cover of “I Don’t Trust Myself” by John Mayer.

The main feedback Tom provided to me was that he was happy I tried a hybrid approach to drum production in several different variations. For those who didn’t reference my previous post about this, hybrid drum recordings involves using a mix of acoustic drums, as well as electric drums.

In “My Life” specifically, I re-recorded the whole part with my e-kit, and then triggered samples for the kick and snare as opposed to using the stock Logic drum sounds. However, for the cymbals and Hi-hats, I left the Logic sounds as is. For “Dreams” and “Use Somebody”, I took a slightly different approach for drum production. Instead of using the e-kit, I decided to sample replace the kick, snare, and tom hits of my acoustic drum performance. This was a cool approach because it more closely matched the pop snare and kick sound I was looking for. The acoustic drums we recorded in the studio sounded great, but it felt more of a 70s vibe than the pop sound I was looking for.

For my “I Don’t Trust Myself” cover, Tom suggested that I re-track the acoustic drums, and include a room mic to capture some other sounds. He also suggested trying to make the electronic hi-hat more closely match the sounds of the acoustic kit. The way to do this would be to treat the mixing of these elements together as opposed to separately. He suggested using techniques such as a parrallel compression bus, distortion in parallel, a room reverb for acoustic drums, spring reverb, and then send all of this to a drum master bus.

For my evening songwriting session with Matt, we worked on identifying the different types of form he could do for creating a song. We also discussed what chords would work with his melodies during the bridge. I really liked his song, and I hope we can continue to work on more together in the future!