Music Production #FastTracks - Doctorboss | LevelsFM

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Music Production #FastTracks - Doctorboss | LevelsFM - YouTube

any time that the artist is coming in to do their part uh i mean vocals especially it's just so important that performance is everything the vocal performance is what's going to make or break the record whether like it doesn't i don't know doesn't matter how fancy and great your drum pattern is or or how brilliant the arrangement is if the vocal performance isn't uh earth-shattering if it doesn't make people feel the emotions that the artist felt when writing the song then i don't think it's going to move that many people so now we're faced with the challenge of helping an artist a singer who has sung a song if it's the first record you made with them they might have singer songwriter first real record

you're making like they probably have sung that song for a decade like it's not it's not out of the question that they might have it might have been one of the first songs that they wrote that they love um so finding a way for it not to just be muscle memory for it not to just be a you know a performance that is technically correct because i know how to sing the song i know the words i know the notes i'm going to sing it the way that i've thought about singing it forever and the way that i have sung it forever isn't that kind of performance isn't necessarily going to be connecting to what inspired the artist to write the song in the first place what inspired them to write those words in the first place so we talked about lighting we talked about um you know vibe and that's still important when it's just the singer of course in the in the booth and it's super tough like some people

yeah i made a closet over in the corner and you're gonna get in the closet and you're gonna stand up against this mic and it's going to be black in there and just sing it and it's like that's not it's not really going to work if you've got to pull them out and put them in the control room and throw some headphones on uh if you've got a you know i had a very early on an artist that i worked with who was super subconscious self-conscious about her voice not confident whatsoever i took a baby monitor and i strapped it to the mic and had the other end of the baby monitor away from the mic in this in the studio but i put a mic up to it so that i could feed that into her headphones so that she could hear a crunchy distorted cool sounding punk rock version of herself instead of a pristine beautiful sounding version of herself so that she could just

relax like you're not scream at me like give me the raw this was kind of a punky band and i needed her to forget about the fact that we're recording and lean into the raw energy of what she's singing about um so whatever it takes often with songs that one of my the easiest tricks is with songs that are emotional oh i wrote the song about a girl whatever old girlfriend what's she doing now i don't know it's not like there's no emotional attachment to them whatsoever uh and now we need to find that emotion again before i have them sing it that's exactly what i have to do so in those situations very often i feel like i'm going to get called out for this being my old the old bag of tricks but you know i've set it up i've got the vibe we had a good chat to kind of let them vent about life and

how their day was and all that stuff on the studio couch before they went in they're at the mic we got levels shout out levels and i will say tell me and i won't i'll make sure i don't ask them this before this point in the process in pre-production i will not broach the subject tell me where you were when you wrote this song i've got the lyrics i've had them for weeks i know what it's about and it's dark in there and they say well this is about a girl and we had this thing going on it was like four years ago i lived in coquitlam uh shout out they uh it went well and then we broke whatever the story is right but they basically they'll they'll it's like the confession booth right they'll tell me the whole story
and when i feel like they've hit the end i don't respond i hit record so they finished the story they've put themselves where they were when they were when they wrote the song when they felt the emotions that inspired them to write the song and then the intro plays and then they sing that's great and it's worked extraordinarily well that's great that's a power move i love that that's great