Production Tutorial - "The producer's Toolbox'' Extra lesson: Step by step production process of a @Meno song.

Hello Steemit!

Today I'm going to add a little lesson on how I produced a @meno song , and try to break it into steps , so maybe you can grab certain tips or tricks that you may like along the way !

Making my mess in an amp room... I love it!

So , the song I'm picking up for today is Meno's Puppets , a really cool song , and certainly one of my favorites of his , that is why I went on to produce it in the first place haha. Let me show you the demo and some acoustic performance so you get what was my starting point for this one:

That time when Meno played upright bass... I wonder if that instrument still exists?

Ok , so as you can see , the idea of the song is already established , it's pretty much a rock song with that touch of songwriter style to it , so , I already knew that I was not going to touch the essence of the song , just make decisions in order to ''build the story'' a little better.

So , let's try and break it into steps:

1. Drums

This is more of a personal opinion , but to me drums are THE most important part of a production ( after having a good song and arrangement of course ) . Badly performed and/or recorded drums will diminish the quality of the whole finished product very noticeably. So , my personal recommendation , don't cut your budget on this one , or at least try not to. I am not a fan of sampling or over-editing drums , unless the style of song requires it . I like to have a good drum performance from start to end , a couple takes , and make corrections from there , trying not to lose the human element in the performance.

This photo is from the actual drum session for this song...a lot of microphone testing!

As in 85% of all the productions I do , I had my brother @piterman behind the drum kit! We recorded this session at MCL Studios in Buenos Aires and we had Carlos Laurenz as the recording engineer , a true pro! It was a very nice learning experience for me as I watched everyone in the studio work. I was still kind of an amateur producer by that time so I was filming and taking notes like crazy !

We got some very nice raw drum tracks from this session , I was very happy with it and I barely edited the parts , just very specific things.

This is with no editing or processing whatsoever , completely raw drum track!

2 . Guitars

Well , this is more of my area but I took a very different approach of what I usually do , no formula works for everything , so instead of building many layers and parts I took more of a band approach , as the song is played live with 2 guitars , I tried to keep that vibe .

There are two main guitars:

A strat doing the main song motifs played by me and a more overdriven guitar doing the riffs played by brother Jose Antonio , who used an Ibanez prestige , that guitar was his main one for more than 10 years , before he started building his own instruments.

Not the actual guitars , but you get the idea of the contrast I was looking for!

The rest of the guitar layers come in an out in order to bring variety to each section of the song , clean layers , doubling up parts , etc. This way I can make more obvious contrasts between the verse , chorus and bridge. Here in the isolated guitar tracks its very obvious:

Gear wise , I used a Vox Ac15 ( again!) with a modded Boss DS-1 for the distortion sounds but instead of using a Shure Sm57 I used a Sennheiser e609 as it had some extra brightness that worked better for this song in my opinion.

3. Bass

I actually played this one , even though I'm not really a bass player I sometimes record it and I find it fun! I went for a really distorted and dirty sound for this one , to add that rock element to the song , bass is an extremely important compliment to the guitar tone , the reason why I tend to go for trebly guitars is because I am thinking of the bass filling up that space, it then is easier to mix as they are not fighting for frecuencies that much .

I used a Jaguar-style bass that my brother @meno made , recorded direct using the trusty Sansamp Psa-1 plug-in. A must for bass tones in my opinion , simple , yet very effective!

Let's hear the isolated bass track:

4. Editing , Mixing , Mastering

Well , now it was time to put it all together ! I did all the editing , my brother Jose Antonio mixed it in his studio and the mastering was done by Sergio Vivar in La Real Sociedad Studios in Ecuador !

As a final touch I added a little intro with a George Carlin quote , just for fun. This is the final result!:

Well , this wraps it up for today ! I hope you get some ideas from this step by step process to apply in your own recordings! Do you like the final result? Can you spot the similarities and differences? If you have any studio experiences like this I'd like to know them!

As always , I am happy to discuss or answer any question related to this article , or recording in general :) .

Thanks for reading and listening!
Signing Off

Pechiche Mena