The first vocal off “The Amazing Faculty” album is titled “Leave The Heart” and features lyrics written and performed by TK Wonder.
Vocal session coming up at the end of the month. She really nailed this one so I can’t wait!
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#Olek - the end is far exhibition at Jonathan LeVine Gallery NYC against my wrought iron piece!
A lot of producers post on forums such as Gearslutz about how to overcome writer’s block, how long it takes to finish a song, how to arrange, etc. so I thought it would be cool to create a post about the approach I decided to take on this journey to produce my first album titled “The Amazing Faculty”.
For me I love the creating process - writing new melodies and developing fresh ideas so with this album I wanted to get out as many ideas as possible (and quickly) rather than completing each track from start to finish before going to the next (which is how I use to work). This was great because I got to consistently stay in the creative (fun) stage and before I knew it I was already up to 15 concepts with some of them pretty well developed. Once I reached this point I went back and starting working on each of them in an iterative fashion starting from the first track (which BTW is titled Breakout). This kept everything fresh and prevented me from getting too bogged down in any one particular idea. Of course there was some drawbacks to this. For example I used some of the same percussion elements in order to facilitate a quicker song writing process – to be addressed. In any event I think this approach was more beneficial than detrimental and I’m happy I decided to switch up my process / work flow as it forced me to get out of my comfort zone. Ok so I basically kept doing rounds of revisions until I got to a point where I was ready for some feedback on which tracks could potentially become vocals and which ones would remain as instrumentals. I selected 12 of the 15 ideas for the album and right now all of them are about 75% done with only a rough mix in place. By the way I started in early September (after returning from my Ibiza holiday) and finished all 15 concepts by December!
In terms of vocals… I’ve always enjoyed writing. I use to write poetry and now I’m writing more in the ABAB structure. I have a lot of material and I’m always writing to express myself. Vocals bring several things to the table and hence why I would like to have some on the album. They give tracks much more distance as they now have a better chance to be remixed and getting licensed from other labels, people of course relate to vocals which gives the song more of a stand out and memorable quality, and yes it does help move tracks along although I don’t think filling up space is how I would put it. Furthermore, it’ll give the album much more of a personal touch rather than using vocal samples everyone has access to (although I might have to do this lol).
So my idea was that I would get to a point where I’m happy enough to gauge interest on my music from vocalists. If the vocalist felt a connection with one of the songs then we would go through the lyrics I wrote to see if there’s interest there and finally match up the lyrics to the song. I’m open to ideas and adjusting the lyrical content (or to create totally new lyrics) and I always leave writing the vocal melody in terms of how it’s sung to the vocalist herself. So that’s where I am right now. It’s basically another round of revisions and potentially adding vocals to get some of these instrumentals to the next level.
Finally, I would focus on all the post production edits, transitions, fx, and of course the final mix down before sending it off for mastering. I know everything will be right at that point so I’m well on my way. My goal is to have the album out in a years’ time which would bring me to a release date around this August.
This post was inspired to those who took the time to give me feedback thus far so I want to thank the PTB crew (my brother, JJ Stamm as well as Matt Crosta), Eric Rezn, TK Wonder, Arpi Atapy, and especially singer and songwriter Eitch.
After last year’s trip to Ibiza in August I decided I would start my first artist album and gave myself 1 year to complete it so that it would be ready by this year’s trip to Ibiza. I started in September and after a slow December and January I actually already finished my first pass at all 12 tracks slated for the album titled The Amazing Faculty.
Time to start really mixing these down and for that I’ll be moving from my Sony MDR-7509s to the Phonon SMB-02s.
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Instrumachines - an article by Bryan Kim on Araabmuzik -
Playing “live” has been the recent fad this past few years with the rise of laptops and other DJ driven production gear and although many artists really do have and play with a live setup this is IMO somewhat to the next level.
I must admit this might be a bit overwhelming to do throughout a song, one after another although you can’t help but appreciate the skill and mastery of the MPC that is displayed here with Araabmuzik!
I just scored a whole box of classic house and disco records for 35 bucks! Had to lug it home 15 blocks but well worth it.
Selected artists include (in no order): Roland clark, Tony Humphries, Tony Varnado, Junior Vasquez, David Morales, Eric Kupper, Shep Pettibone (one of my all time favorite producers), Masters at Work, Peter Daou, Danny Tenaglia, Kerry Chandler, Frankie Knuckles, DJ Pierre & George Morel, Bobby Konders, Terry Farley, Pete Heller, Satoshi Tomiie, Robert Owens, Todd Terry, Armand Van Helden, DJ Disciple…
Selected labels include (in no order): Easy Street, Emotive Records, Virgin, Arista, Atlantic, Ministry of Sound, ffrr, 12” Dance Classics, House Party, T.K. Records, 12” Maxi, Strictly Rhythm, Nugroove Records, Unidisc, RCA…
Something about having the physical record, artwork, sleeve inserts, and reading about who was part of the record and where it was mixed and mastered that always attracted me to and is so special about vinyl.
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