Tag Archives: studio recording

Posted on by

Music Monday – 12 Oct 20 – Back To The Roots

Back in 2007, I registered this domain, vibesnscribes.com, to start a blog about two topics: (1) reviews about music I listen to and (2) general daily topics I felt compelled to blog about.

Back then blogging was all the rage. Twitter just got off the ground, as well as Facebook, but to me, one’s blog was always more personal and self-controlled. As my long time friend in tech and podcasting, DarrenKeith (http://myloveformusic.blogspot.com) says, it’s your OWN digital garden. Well, this is an attempt to begin a weekly series on my music production journey and all the paths that encompass it. Other days of the week will be left to the two topics above (where I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time over the last 13 years blogging about). I often miss blogging, with the draw of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter seemingly always taking over my online time with algorithms always attempting to show me and tell me what I should be looking at (which most times is inaccurate). While Medium is huge as a blogging platform, my own site is, well, my own. Blogging like this will, again, have to be a created habit so, we’ll see how that goes. Consider Music Mondays just a brain dump on what I’m involved with and what I hope to achieve.

I’ve always had a music production studio of some sort, one that has grown over the last 25 years to a space that has allowed me to release my own projects, work on projects of remote and global collaboration, land an opportunity to score a ten-episode webseries on YouTube and helped me sharpen my skills (although not as sharp as I believe they could be). I love composing/writing, producing, and releasing the music, though it’s the latter that seems to be most difficult for me on a regular, not because it IS difficult, but because the system(s) I desire to put into place sometimes just don’t really get off the paper (from a habitual standpoint). Last I checked, I have (in various states) twelve projects going on. The latest (personal) one is releasing a 10 track project on Bandcamp next year. The project will mostly be comprised of tracks I started back in 2012 or so (that have since been removed from my Soundcloud page) and involve me getting back to some older methods of how I was recording and producing tracks (hence the image of the Akai MPC 2500 above). It was fun getting back to re-learning that tech this weekend. It showed me that ,even though some of the processes are not as convenient as what I use today, it’s still as enjoyable using it to bring those older tracks into the present. Many times (as I heard mentioned on a YouTube video last night), often times, limitations can spark creativity and more simply put, everything involved in the “longer harder” way can also be enjoyable for many reasons I’ll save for another Music Monday. That will continue for sometime as I bridge the use of the MPC, Logic Pro X, and Native Instruments to get this project moving and done. I’m looking forward to releasing it, not only because it’s been two years since the last release, but listening back to these older tracks showed me that I was creating more music (even though WIPs) to share on Soundcloud. Some got some great comments, but they were essentially just sitting there. With the advent of distribution and music streaming platforms, there’s really no better time to get music into the ears of whatever audience one hopes to. I released a project under another alias that hit the streaming platforms. The purpose of it was tri-fold: (1) See how well my chosen distribution works, (2) see how well this new genre I am exploring does, for me as an artist, on major streaming platforms and how it is received by listeners where ever I expose it, and (3) allowed me to begin to learn the ins/outs of a new synthesizer I purchased. Surprisingly, with no marketing push, a few listeners in a Facebook group I belong to really liked it.

My new journey, one I hope to fully leverage (after getting the bug from composing that webseries) is two-fold: sync licensing and film scoring. I look around my home studio and grow tired of saying “you’re fully equipped”, so the old saying is ringing loud in my brain: “Don’t talk about it, be about it” (and that means passed brain dump blogging).

Have a great week…

#oceansofrhythm

Fresh!

Posted on by

New EP in progress ::: Day 1 ::: 16 Jun 17

IMG_9069

Greetings all….
As I customarily do, when I start a new project, I usually blog about for two reasons. First, to sort of document the journey so I can look back on it in the future (it helps when/if it gets down to interview time and I want to cite certain things about the creative/production process and related thoughts). Secondly, I do so for those who have a general interest on the “behind the scenes” stuff that goes along with an entire creative process such as this.

While I won’t drop the name of the project until it’s time to start pre-release marketing near the drop date, I will give you a little background along the way. That said, this project is a collection of tunes (a smaller collection than originally created) that was inspired by a business trip I took long ago, halfway across the world, ten years agi. The tunes (with the exception of one) was inspired by various aspect of daily life that I experienced on this first trip (I actually made two trips, two consecutive summers, to the same place, but the tracks were inspired by the first trip).

All the tracks, with the exception of the title track, are written, recorded and arranged by me. The stage I’m in now is track editing and mix preparation. Over the last three days, I’ve been in the studio doing just that. For example, tonight I demixed the drum track and began preparing to bus them to their respective auxiliary channels. This basic process allows for grouping those bus tracks to allow greater control over track automation and effects processing over essentially what is an entire drum kit. The next step will be adding a guitar track and essentially following that same process with respect to a single guitar track.

As for the overall concept, all the tracks tell a story, cohesively, but individually tell singular stories in and of themselves. For those of you who are on Instagram, you can get a sneak peek, if you will, to the creative journey by following the simple hashtag #bsun2017. Hope you come along for the ride.

It’s Friday….enjoy the weekend. Happy Father’s Day to all you fathers (biologically or not).

Oceans of rhythm….
Fresh!

Posted on by

The Making of Soulosophy – Day 2

Soulosophy Concept Art v1 Brown

Greetings…

Over the last few days, I began to take stock of how I *think* I want this project to unfold. In the last post, I mentioned it was to be a 10 track project but it has since grown two more tracks. I plan on stunting any further growth…, LOL.

Right now, I plan on inviting 24 other artists to participate on this project, whether they all do remains too early to be seen, but the invite email is going out this weekend. Of the 24, I have four already committed, so that’s good, so now starts the real groundwork: logistics, determining how much remote collaboration will be needed, musician assignments to each song, etc. This should prove interesting (one drummer I really would like to have on the project will only play an acoustic set – which I don’t have in my studio), but better to nail down this now verses later. Stay tuned.

::: oceans of rhythm:::

Fresh,

Posted on by

In The Lab – Dec 2009

Greetings crew….

Happy Holidays (Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, etc) to all. A lot of you catch my tweets about what I’m doing musically, so I wanted to give you a peek at where it all happens. All the composers, songwriters, musicians, etc have such a spot, most of them (obviously your truly) tend to call it a lab of some sort. I was talking with a friend yesterday, who’s a songwriter/musician/producer about studio workspaces and how they run the gamut of styles. I kinda thrive on ergonomics, comfort, and organization, etc…helps the muse flow freely. As for as tools, I’m a firm believer that the best utilize what they have to the max to get the results needed.

I’m looking forward to completing a long awaited CD that my partner and I have been working on, continuing work on a collaboration called “contempojazzsoulhop” with my boys Fave and Todd, a smooth jazz project with KLWJazz, more remixes for Philip Clark, gospel jazz keyboardist Kevin Battle, vocal group Destined 2 Praise, vocalist Dana Yates, more production work with AfterSix Productions, saxophonist Harron Evoria, annnnnnd my own CD project, whew. Ok, anyway, here’s mine, in it’s current form:

That’s about it…now u see where the tweets flow from, the hangout spot.

Happy New Year…

peace,
F!

Posted on by

The Musical Journey – The Current Flow

304288_Full

Greetings….

10:15pm, Friday night. The day part was long, and busy, so I am definitely appreciative of this part. I’m sitting in the studio…really chillin’. As usual, I’m thinking of projects that need to continue, get finished, or get started, but tonite…I’m relaxing, and catching up on blogging (*yawn*).

They say when it rains, it pours. It’s been doing that figuratively and literally (more figuratively then literally). For the longest time, I, and my biz partner, Dan McCollum, have been working on our CD project….the longest time is a time I care not to divulge, but hey…life get’s in the way. The CD is entitled “What Love Is”. We are known as After Six Productions. It started out, and still is, a labor of love project, as opposed to one created to get a record deal. We have a record company established under which A6P falls, Hall Effect Records. While we are now down to pretty much nearing completion of the project, we’re really seeing how much work it entails. Our only desire, be it lofty or not, is to put out songs that can stand the test of time. A bit ambitious…maybe…but in light of what the urban music industry is offering, we feel it’s high time for a change….we’ll see. We’re coming.

I won’t bore ya with my humble beginnings, but just let you know what the journey has been like over the last year. I’ve had the studio running for quite some time. This year there have been other projects like recording a four-voice ensemble to a welcome song written for our church mass choir. The result of that demo CD drew similar artists in, with songs of their own from time to time (I have three in the queue currently). Having *clientele* like this is not something I expected at this point, but it gives me an idea what it really takes to produce and learn the recording hardware and software I have.

Over the last few months, I’ve begun a remote collaboration project with two other very talented musicians AND friends I have on twitter: @fave (in Houston) and @toddkelley (in Cali). Fave and Todd have been doing collaboration songs back and forth that I’ve been fortunate to hear. These tracks, everyone, have been slammin’. Down the line, we all started talking about collaborating to some extent. Fave came around and seem to set the wheels in motion, farming out some incomplete tracks to Todd and I to work on, Todd doing the same to Fave, and Fave feeding what Todd and he did to me, for the guitar work. So far, tracks done, and released to the public to hear, have been met with great enthusiasm. The name of the project is called C3 or deeper still, “contempojazzsoulhop”, a name that describes the flow of all three of us combined as one. Here’s Fave talking about the origin and development of the project (yeah, man…we both owe u inputs! LOL):

I’ve been working on my own tracks for years, under a project entitled Songs From The Future (SFTF). While I won’t get into my whole workflow, inspirations and such, songs come to me in many different ways, different times and are often built from a little as something like this. My plan is to get under way with my CD in 2010, as soon as we drop “What Love Is”

Within the last, what, almost two months, I got the grand opportunity (again via Twitter) to be asked to do remixes (seemingly a life long dream), for one VERY funky and soulful artist by the name of Philip Clark. Via some tweets read about the development of “contempojazzsoulhop”, he got wind of the fact that I produce my own music and was always interested in doing a remix. After a little discussion, he approached me and asked if I wanted to do some remixes of tracks from his debut album. Of course I jumped at the chance to do so and picked the track “Granted”. Happy to say that after hearing the rough version, he is pleased with it….but not more pleased that I to know he’s diggin’ it. I plan two other remixes of the track. He’s a pleasure to work with and has displayed a great mind for the business as well. I like what he has in store for the remix project as a whole. I applaud that, as well as his musical flow. Definitely check out his tracks. His official site is here. Much thanks to the shout for my podcast.

As far as live music, I’ve been playing in my church’s music ministry with all the various choirs since 1994 as well as with a band, 150East for a few years now. Here’s a short vid of the band:


Since 150East, I’ve started teaching guitar, as well as studying jazz guitar under a Washington DC guitar instructor and recording artist, Dave Mosick. The latest project about to kick off is with a local sax player and good friend, Kelvin Wilson.

So, needless to say….busy for sure. Just tryna make it happen, and that always starts in ‘The Lab.

I won’t say what time it is now…but, I will say…thank for reading….The weekend is here…let’s go…

Shouts to my boy Fave and Todd for the mad flow!

peace,
Doug