A musical experiment: bass and rhythm added to an #openmic contestant's entry (Broken Mirror by @OneTrueBrother)

An inspiring  side effect of the Openmic contest is that it can trigger music collaborations across the globe. Viewing other #openmic contestants’ entries can indeed be very inspiring:
This week, I stumbled upon the entry from @OneTrueBrother for the Songwriter OpenMic Week 1 (Also Openmic Week 61).  

Dazzled by the grove and depth of this song, I had to grab my Cajon and play along. Then, I contacted @OneTrueBrother and asked him to send me the original video with the idea of adding my little rhythmic touch to it, which he did. 

I added a shaker, then composed and recorded a Cajon-line and a Bass-line.  After editing, mixing and mastering the result, a new version of the piece came to life.   

And here it is:      

A special thank you for all organizers and sponsors of the openmic contests on Steemit, that allow musicians from around the world to meet and inspire each other!  Namely @Luzcypher for the organization and @pfunk, @meno, @curie, @xeldal and  @ausbitbank for sponsoring.   

It’s the first time I do this and there were quite some challenges. For example, starting with a track where guitar and vocals are already blended together, i.e. audio that the musician did not record for further development in mind, is not an easy task! Yet, it does sound pretty good, don’t you think?  

Interested in the process? Follow through: 

1/ Extracted the audio from the video (guitar and vocals on a stereo track). 

2/ Made a rough EQuing on it to let space for the other instruments and remove low end rumble. 

3/ Improvised on the cajon to get the feel I wanted to add to the song. 

4/ Attempted to sync the audio to a click. Failed. 

5/ Used an AT 2020 mike to record an Egg shaker that would provide a reference for the rhythm (single take). 

6/ Edited the newly recorded Egg track to improve its regularity and follow tempo fluctuations: Kudos to @OneTrueBrother: It is quite difficult to keep perfect tempo when playing just guitar + vocal, and he did quite a good job. Fluctuations were manageable! Applied hall reverb with some diffusion on the Egg track. 

7/ Placed a Shure Beta61 mike inside the cajon to record a ‘Kick’ track, and positioned the AT2020 about 80cm in front of it for the “Snare” Track. Recorded a first take on the cajon. 

8/ Processed Kick and Snare. Kick: all cut above 400 Hz. Use a transient exciter to give it a snap. Snare: cut below 300Hz. Added an Echo with very small delay time, acting thus a little like a reverb with a lot of diffusion for the sparkle. 

9/ Recorded 2 more takes on the Cajon. The third one was the good one. 

10/ Edited the two Cajon tracks. Correction of a few mistakes. Translation of a few hits by a few tens of millisecond to “hide” tempo fluctuations. Further adjusted the effects on both cajon tracks.

11/ Connected the Bass (Warwick Corvett) to a DI box and plugged it straight in my DAW. Improvised on the bass for 30 minutes to write a bass line. 

12/ Recorded the bass. 2 Takes. The second one was the good one. No edition of the track required :-). Makes sense: my main instrument is e-bass.  

13/ Set up a frequency selective side chain compression to the bass triggered by low frequency hits of the Cajon Kick track. (Each time the kick hits, the areas between 50-200Hz looses 12dB with very short attack and release times). This is what gives the punch to the low range.  

14/ Mixed the five tracks in volume and frequency. Minimal panning. For example, I added a little boost to the guitar/vocal track around 1k-1.5k and cut a little the freq. bands where the guitar was loudest. Objective: make the vocal come out more vs the guitar. Stuff like that… 

15/ Mastered the mixed version using the following chain: EQ, multiband compression, stereo widener, tape saturation and a maximizer. Rendered the new version of the song. 

16/ I had video-recorded all takes on my tablet, so it was time now for some fun making a little video out of it! I used the new version of the song as reference point, synced the video takes, cropped them and distributed them on the screen! I am quite happy with the result and it was a lot of fun: I will probably be doing more of these! 

I hope you enjoyed watching as much as I did producing! 

Musically from @Muphy   

Credits:
Songwriting (chords + Lyrics) : @OneTrueBrother
Guitar + Vocal: @OneTrueBrother
Electric bass, Shaker and Cajon: @Muphy
Sound Processing, Mixing, Mastering: @Muphy
Video Production: @Muphy   

The original post from @OneTrueBrother is here:
https://steemit.com/openmic/@onetruebrother/steemit-openmic-week-61-original-song-broken-mirror

If this post generates Steem, it will be shared equally between @Muphy and @OneTrueBrother .

Image Credit: The decorative frieze was built from an illustration found on Pixabay.com

Hi,
I’m @muphy, My life revolves around music production, teaching sciences, and discovery through travel.
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