Electric Feel
August 10, 2014
Author: Calvin Winzler-Lane
“Regrets” by Melanie Eaton
January 20, 2014
This was my final project for Advanced Session Recording. We were lucky enough to work with the talented Melanie Eaton and her original song, “Regrets”. This is my personal mix and my first real attempt at mastering.
Special thanks to:
Melanie Eaton
Jaden Gebbink
Freddie Reed
Desirae Jones
Rick Navarro
and Jake King
White Foxes [no vocals]
January 20, 2014
I wrote this song a long, long time ago. I think the demo is buried somewhere on my SoundCloud. This is pretty much the finished instrumentation, but I’m still writing the lyrics. This was inspired by Fleet Foxes, but I tried to get a slightly heavier sound. I played every instrument except the drums, shout out to Slate Digital’s “Trigger” plugin on that one (unfortunately I only have the demo).
– Ac. Guitar
– E.Guitar
– Bass
– Mandolin
– Drums/Perc.
– Element Synth
– BGVs
Also, an experimental use of Pro Tools’ half-speed recording function. I recorded acoustic guitar at half-speed (the song played slower), so during normal playback the guitar is sped up (just like spinning vinyl faster makes everything sound very “chipmunky”). Honestly it just made it sound like the mandolins, but it’s still a neat little feature! It comes in after the chorus. Hope you like and thanks for listening!
Twenty Below
January 11, 2014
First Day Into the Dark
January 11, 2014
A project for Music Producing & Arrangement, we had to choose a song we knew by heart and cover it, staying as true to the original as we could. Again, there was a 2:00 time limit, and First Day of my Life didn’t flow as smoothly as a wanted after cutting things out. After a few hours of tweaking I gave up and decided to add parts from another song with a similar progression, I Will Follow You Into the Dark (after transposing it down a half-step). Turns out they work pretty well together and have an interesting depth to the lyrics. Rhythm Guitar panned left, picking pattern on right. Bass and Vocals right up the middle. Pretty much how the original is set up. As a requirement we needed to have some kind of harmony in the song; I sang the introduction as an a cappella arrangement.
Radial [Mashup]
January 9, 2014
A few weeks ago it was requested that I do a mashup of Radioactive and Royals (my family was on a Pentatonix binge and they happened to cover both songs). I definitely had more fun with this than I thought I would, and it was just challenging enough to still be enjoyable. The most annoying thing about mashups is figuring out a way to isolate the vocals, which is harder than you might think. Sometimes you can find the stems (groups of instruments; e.g. guitar stem, drum stem, vocal stem…) of a song somewhere online, but I had no luck with either track. Luckily, Royals is a pretty simple song, and it sounds like they just used an MPC or drum loop for rhythm. This was good news! Once I searched through the song and found a sample of just the drums (no singing), I was able to work my magic and remove the entire rhythm section. There’s a lot of boring numbers and explanations to go along with that process, but the important part is that I got the isolated vocals I needed.
So sit back, take a listen, and enjoy!