After yesterday’s catchup day, it was time to begin pre-production for my advanced production capstone project. As mentioned yesterday, I am doing an arrangement of Lean on Me by Bill Withers in a modern R&B style.

I began by playing Brandon the guitar part I recorded with Kennedy a few weeks back. Brandon made a suggestion of trying to come up with some reharmonization ideas. He sat down at the piano, and started by experimenting with relative minor chords. This added a cool flavour because it changed the mood of Bill’s composition. I described to Brandon that it made me feel more like the tune was written from the perspective of the other person who is struggling and is looking for someone to lean on. 

Once we had this idea of the new perspective, the chords started falling into place. We added some diminished chords and tried to give it a gospel feel, especially for the bridge section. I was envisioning there being a big wall of harmonies, as well as gospel claps on 2+4.

Once these chord ideas were worked out, I got Brandon to record this piano part in Logic. We recorded it in MIDI so we could have the ability to manipulate later if we needed to. After this foundation was laid, I asked Brandon if he could also experiment with recording some basic synth parts and strings. I liked the ideas Brandon tracked, so I asked if in the next few days he could work on crafting sounds. The next steps involved editing some of these parts, as well as adding some VST drums over top.