Song Exploder : Taking Tips From Greats

Jordan Duggan
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

Introduction

At any stage of being an audio producer we can learn so much from accomplished producers and artists; These are the people who have found workflows that are consistently successful and have tried and tested numerous techniques to land on what they are known for now, so a project that helps break down and take on a successful production style proved to be as useful and igniting as it was challenging and humbling.

The task I was given was to adapt an established song into the production style of an established producer, crossing genres for added learning curves and difficulty. To help us research our producers we were introduced to the podcast series ‘Song Exploder’, this blurb from the site best describes the podcast:

‘Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode is produced and edited by host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway in Los Angeles. Using the isolated, individual tracks from a recording, Hrishikesh asks artists to delve into the specific decisions that went into creating their work. Hrishikesh edits the interviews, removing his side of the conversation and condensing the story to be tightly focused on how the artists brought their songs to life.’

Incredibly educational and interesting to delve into the minds of artists and finding out why they make the creative decisions that bring us the songs we enjoy everyday, I highly recommend exploring the site and listening to some episodes:

A few days before recieving this task I was remenissing on some of the songs I used to listen to in high school, getting nostalgic you know, and I went through high school when genres such as ‘emo’ and ‘screamo’ were born so after a playlist of Taking Back Sunday, The Used and other greats of the time I landed on an old favourite which would become the song I chose to adapt; Dashboard Confessional’s song Hands Down, emedded for anyone unfamiliar or that wants a refresher:

These days the song, to me sounds a bit whiny in the vocal delivery and the lyrics are cringe worthy with the over use of death and killing from happiness in the chorus so I wanted to spin the song in a way that feels relevant today by taking the lyrics which were a devoted love song in it’s prime and putting them to a more intimate and seductive style.

I’ve become a fan of the band Alt-J because of their seductive delivery and writing of songs so they became my choice of production style and luckily they have an episode of Song Exploder for their track ‘In Cold Blood’ which you can listen to here:

But it was their song ‘Tesselate’ that I felt more accurately portrays the body swaying, bouncy groove I wanted to aim for and the dynamic lyric delivery where it’s smooth sultry and almost whispered in some sections then belted showcasing lead singer Joe Newman’s unique vocal timbre:

I had my lyrics and the style I would aim to adapt them into, next was to research Alt-J’s producer Charlie Andrew and find out what techniques, gear choices and production methods I could take into this project to help me recreate Alt-J’s style.

Production

Making this project come to life I wanted to take some of the artists creative decisions as well as the producers methods and use them to create a new song that sounds like an Alt-J song. Some of the notes I took from the Song Exploder episode were the bands song writing workflow and vocal layering techniques; They mention in the episode that they record a lot of idea’s as they come to be sifted through later in the writing process. As for vocal layering Joe Newman talks about recording multiple takes of sections singing them in slightly different styles and rather than choosing one take, layering them together and using all of them.

Researching their producer Charlie Andrew was a highly illuminating experience and I recommend researching top producers to anyone wanting to get into the industry; Every producer is unique and some of them use techniques that you probably haven't been taught and may not have thought would produce good results so when asking yourself ‘I wonder how they made that sound?’ when listening to a track actually take the time to research and find out, learning only ends when we stop getting our questions answered. Specifically on Charlie Andrew I found this great article where he goes into how he has been producing the band since their first release and a lot of the production decisions made with their successful first album:

From all the great info in this interview I took some notes on his recording techniques such as running synths and keyboards through a guitar amp for added character and distortion, equipment choices such as the Neumann TLM103 as a vocal mic, the band’s instrument choices such as the drum kit using a saucepan instead of traditional cymbals and his mixing techniques such as distorting the room mic’s to add unique character to the recordings.

I also want to touch on my wishlist for this project, If I had more time dedicated to this project I would have taken a lot more from the production style, in fact with enough time and connections I would have attempted to use all of the production and instrumentation methods used to learn from them, to experiment and get to know them as much as possible to incorporate them into my own production workflow because something I’ve learnt since delving into audio production is that it’s very hard to understand how a technique works and sounds like without getting hands on and using it for yourself. The use of electric guitar’s, live drums and live amps rather than emulators are just some of the techniques I will hopefully get the chance to experiment with in future productions or with a remix of this track because I ran out of time for it to reach the quality I was aiming for, regardless of all that here is the result:

Conclusion

As I mentioned above so much can be learnt from studying and actually using techniques that established artists and producers use in their productions so this will become a regular practice of mine. Next on the list I would like to research a more heavily electronic producer such as Flume or Damon Albarn. As far as lessons from this project, I like the song writing method of recording idea’s as they come and arranging them and expanding on the later, I really like some of the drum samples I made from saucepans and distorting room mic sounds to add a depth and character that wasn’t there before and that’s just a few things proving my point of how much you can learn from other producers without actually compromising your flavour but adding to it.

JDuggan

Jordan Duggan

Written by

Bachelor of Audio Student, SAE Institute. Aspiring to be a music producer, audio engineer and expert in the industry.

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