A Day in the Life of Composer Camille St. Vincent
Composer/ singer/ songwriter CAMILLE ST. VINCENT has been around music from her childhood. She formally started learning guitar when in high school. She also grew up singing along to her favorite pop songs. Later, contemporary music composition and singing gave her the confidence to continue with her music, and now she’s amassed a portfolio of tracks that are influenced by Trip Hop, Pop, RnB, Lounge and Electronica. Here she joins us on our virtual yellow and orange sofa to shoot the breeze about her life, music and how she goes from a simple idea to her next new composition. Thanks Camille.
RADIOSPARX: Hi Camille, welcome. It’s great to have you here. We love knowing more about our composers, how they tick and how they create their amazing tracks. Tell us about your day composing; from waking up to going to sleep and how your composing day pans out.
CAMILLE ST. V: Hello Radiosparx! Thanks for choosing me for your feature! It’s lovely to be able to talk about my music because so much of my life is about creativity, be it with words, music, or painting. Music is so much a part of my life, that I’m always humming tunes at any time of the day or evening. My mobile phone is my trusted companion and I use it to record melodies on the go. Sometimes lyrics just appear along with the melody, or it’s just a melody that floats in my mind. Once I’ve got a lyric or a melody strongly fixed in my head, I sit down to create the track in my studio. Composing music is an on-going process which lasts over many hours, sometimes days. When I step into my studio it is like I am putting pen to paper to put my thoughts down, so I can see them there, right in front of me.
From that point on, I work at a feverish pace until the very bare bones of the song is recorded. At that point, I can’t stop until my track has taken a somewhat concrete shape. I add instruments, I delete them, and finally at that point, I leave the song alone so I can hear it the next day with a fresh mind and attitude. Sometimes I finish the whole recording in half a day. Some songs have some unwieldy edges which take time to smooth out. I simply lose track of time during the song-making process!
Then I take my track with me for a drive. Taking it out of the studio is very good for figuring out whether I need to work on some of the vocal parts or the arrangement of the mix. When I’m driving I hear it with a new perspective.
RADIOSPARX: That’s lovely Camille. It sounds like a lot of work, but intensely satisfying to go from humming a tune to it being completed and ready for the world. Thanks for sharing the process with us. Now, tell us about your singing voice. At what age did you start singing, how did you learn your craft? Did you have singing lessons? What is your vocal level — soprano etc.?
CAMILLE ST. V: I have never had singing lessons, but since music HAS been always a part of life since my earliest memories as a child, I know I was singing and humming from my earliest years. My parents had studied music and there was much listening to music and singing at home, so maybe I have inherited a musical gene. My natural voice range is Alto, but when I ventured into recording, I figured out that I could try different voices; chest or head voices for example, and at that point, it all got to be much more fun.
RADIOSPARX: Thanks Camille, your breathy vocals are reminiscent of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s sexy 1969 song — which the whole world went crazy for — “Je t’aime….moi non plus”. Can you talk about the technology and software you use for your compositions?
CAMILLE ST. V: Thanks for the feedback. I mainly use Reason 12.5.1. It was my first audio software back, Reason 2.1. I think, when I started composing in 2001 and over the years, though I might have checked out Ableton, Pro Tools and others, I have remained most comfortable with Reason. My home studio is rather simple. I own more musical instruments than recording gear.
RADIOSPARX: How do you get inspired to write music, and how does this inspiration carry you through to the finished product?
CAMILLE ST. V: When I was a little girl, I remember reading British author Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers book series, which were written in the late 1940s, and were very popular in the 1970s. One of the characters in the books was called Mavis, and she was always lost in a world of music, jumping up in the middle of a lesson to urgently write down her tune. I’m the same. I often urgently snatch up my phone to make notes for a track on it. Sometimes, I take up the guitar to pick out the chord or tune, and I can still do that when I am in my studio, but nothing beats my phone when I am out and about, and I get a tune in my head.
I am hugely inspired by nature and the concept of love. A ray of sunlight, the moon, emerald mountains, and the rain simply sing to me. Love is the eternal quest which resonates in my lyrics. In collaborations, the tune immediately suggests a theme from one of the above and some songs are a literal breeze and seem to write themselves!
Some songs come to me in the morning and by night they have become a track ready for upload. Some take a couple of days. Some don’t pan the way I hear them in my head. So, I let them go for a long time, weeks go by, and I revisit them with a fresh mind, hoping for a breakthrough which nearly always happens.
For my song Un Papillon, I wanted a fragile sound to represent the soft, almost undetectable motion of a butterfly’s wings, and I had to work on getting that sound in the opening of the song. When I hear something inspiring during my work, I start experimenting, trying to find something similar, but not too similar in terms of the sound of the music instrument. So much is in what you hear and what you don’t hear which makes us respond to the music. So, what I pull out of the musical rabbit hole is what sort of Alice I am at that point!
RADIOSPARX: Inspiring Camille. Thank you. What’s your favorite musical style/genre?
CAMILLE ST. V: I simply love good old Pop from the likes of Michael Jackson, Jazz from Diana Krall, Classical music, especially the Romantic and Baroque composers. I used to listen to Beethoven’s 7th symphony on loop. I grew up listening to John Denver, The Carpenters, Simon and Garfunkel and Henry Mancini. The Hollywood style of music is also adorable, Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were, for example.
RADIOSPARX: Thanks Camille. Talk about how you approach the business side of your composing life.
CAMILLE ST. V: I strongly believe that my passion for music will see me through, and it usually does. Writing and composing my best music is my goal. I try to network with people in the music industry and this helps, but my number one focus is my studio work, and composing and creating my next track.
RADIOSPARX: Fantastic. You sound very busy. Please list the musical equipment you use, including all the brand names and app names plus their versions.
CAMILLE ST. V: Certainly. My list is below:
· MacBook Pro
- AKG P420 mic,
- UAD Apollo Twin, sound card
- Behringer Truth (sound monitors)
· A GB&A Acoustic guitar
· An Ibanez Gio Series electric guitar
· An ancient Casio keyboard which I mainly use to trigger sounds in Reason
- Other sundry World Music instruments
· Soundbanks like Native Instruments, Omnisphere etc which are available via Reason.
RADIOSPARX: Thanks and finally Camille, we’d love to talk to you about your track AIMES-MOI which is linked here: https://www.audiosparx.com/sa/summary/play.cfm/crumb.2/crumc.0/sound_iid.1093650
It’s such an ethereal TRIP HOP type of track, contemporary but at the same time retro, a throw-back to the 90s. How did you compose this song?
CAMILLE ST. V: These are the usual style of lyrics from me, quasi mystical, quasi romantic. With this track I started composing the music with no plan in mind. Just the need to make some music! No notion as to what I wanted except a slow beat and an enticing riff. As the piano melody came up with its simple notes, quiet, full of meaning and promise, the lyrics too started within me. When this happens, I note them down quickly on my Mac, take a photo on my mobile, as my mic is a bit away from my desk, and then start recording vocals.
RADIOSPARX: Thanks Camille for sharing your music world with us. We’re proud you’re part of the AudioSparx and RadioSparx music family, a global network that spans over 100 countries. Keep on composing for us!
Listen to CAMILLE ST. VINCENT’S tracks here via www.radiosparx.com
https://www.radiosparx.com/camillestvincent
And here via www.audiosparx.com
