How I Did It

I started by laying out the vocal track and setting the bpm to match. Next I determined what key the song was mostly in, and determined that acoustic guitar chords would go nicely. Laid down the guitar track. Believe it or not, it is a soundfont. The key to getting a realistic guitar track from a keyboard/sampler/soundfont is the key velocity. You start recording live and play the keys that you want on a MIDI keyboard. Then you go into the track and adjust the timing of each note so it's slightly off by just a small random amount. This gives it a 'human' feel. Then you adjust the velocity of each note individually to create a rhythm. You want to make the velocity higher on the notes you want to emphasize, usually in sync with a kick drum hit, and lower in between...but do a couple about halfway in between as well to give it some flair.
Next I composed a drum track with some variations. Then I added the soundeffect in the little break section in the middle of the song.
Next I filled it out with some 'ethereal' chords. Finally I worked on the vocals to fill them out and get the levels right. I turned up the highest frequencies on the mixer by just a bit to accent the "S's" in her voice and make it sound crisp. Turned up the midbass a tad to give it depth.
Here is the recipe for the effect I got on her voice:
-1/2 cup of Large Hall reverb on the original, un-vocoded vocal track.
-1/2 cup of Filter Delay at 50% feedback and 6 steps on each channel of the original, unvocoded vocal track.
-1 cup of Vocoder using a very mellow sine pad as the carrier and the vocal track as the modulator. The notes on the carrier wave should be one octave higher and two octaves higher than the original note.
-1/2 cup of the original vocal track dubbed back into the vocoded track.

Other Notes

shhhh...I like Flavo-Ice freezer pops too. Grape is my favorite.
:)

Search

How I Did It

Uses samples from:

Tools I Used

Samples I Used

Process

Other Notes