In this Special Presentation,
I'll give you a 'behind the scenes' look at how
we write our music, our production process, and
the gear we use. Hope you enjoy
Vlad.
The
writing process (A)
Most songs begin with Sky nutting
out the initial framework for the song including
vocal melodies, lyrics, and the musical framework
which she composes on the Korg Triton LE. A whole
bunch of loops are dumped into the Roland and then
Sky lays her vocal melodies down. With some basic
arrangement and guide drum tracks we have the framework
for a song.
At this stage the song is handed over to me and
I add guitars, drums, more synth tracks and additional
production. At this point, I literally throw everything
I've got at the song (musically speaking...maybe).
Sky takes the director's role and guides the final
arrangement of the song, discarding any unwanted
tracks or sounds. I am known to go overboard sometimes
( :-) )
The writing process
(B)
Some of the Acoustic Songs are
written very quickly using only an acoustic guitar
and voice. For example, "Love will find you
there " was written in under an hour. I was
playing around on the guitar and Sky overheard a
pattern that resonated with her. Before you know
it, she's humming a melody which naturally lead
to an impromptu writing session. It was a magical
experience where the basic song components just
revealed themselves. We just wrote the song where
we sat.
The two methods discussed above
are pretty much how we work. Now lets go through
some of the toys we use, and what we use them for.
The
gear we use
OK, we are not sponsored by any
of these companies, we just like what we use, and
in some cases, we just use it because we know it
so well and basically, we can't justify an upgrade.
Roland VS1880
This is our baby. The mother ship.
We pretty much multi-track on this old thing with
18 tracks of digital bliss. As far as effects go,
delays, filters, reverb, and compression are our
mainstay. These are probably our favs. Nothing fancy
here. OK, so there's all sorts of software that
can blow this thing out of the water. Well, I spose
we are just comfortable here and don't really need
to spend extra cash on new shit. There's always
gonna be something new, and it always takes time
to learn and master new toys. We just prefer to
use this time to write new tracks for now.
Behringer Truth Monitors
Nothing fancy here, but they get the
job done.
Korg Triton le
This is another of our babies. Korg
gear is unreal. Nice sounds, easy to use and tweak.
We generally start out by creating some nice loops
in the sequencer and then dump these into the 1880
for further tweaking.
Fostex T50 RP Headphones
Not sure what we use these for
:-)
