This is a final reflective blog for 16T2 which in my case is Trimester 4 of the Bachelor of Audio course I’m currently studying at SAE Institute. In this blog I will be reflecting on my major project for this trimester, which is an original three track tropical house EP, influenced by the tropical style of Norwegian producer/artist Kygo.

Tropical House is a sub-genre of deep house which is a sub-genre of house music. It possesses typical house music characteristics, usually with a 4/4 kick drum pattern and synthesiser instrumentation. It usually includes tropical instruments such as steel drums, marimba and typically a pan flute sound for melodic phrases or hooks.

It’s described as uplifting and relaxing but at the same time still gets up to dance. This is why over the last century tropical house is becoming extremely popular across music festivals around the world due to its mix of catchy, bright melodic synths and latin percussion instruments.

Kygo is a Norwegian DJ, songwriter, record producer and pianist. As a piano player myself I was very inspired by Kygo after watching various interviews of his production style and technique of starting out on the piano with chord progressions and melodic ideas and then switching these ideas over to the computer on Ableton in my case, to produce and build these ideas around the basic chord progression, which I agree, is where it all begins.

So that was the exact approach I took for this major project. I spent a few weeks initially just solely on the piano itself, figuring out some nice flowing minor key chord progressions (because minor keys have more feeling in my opinion). So the very first step for me once establishing the chord progressions were playing/recording these via MIDI into Ableton, establishing a rhythm and tempo that felt right too. Once that was set, I could start building the tracks around this, trying different sounds and seeing what works and what sounds good. This has been my first experience of writing an EP completely on my own, so there has been a tonne of self directed learning that I’ve had to research in order to achieve the sounds I’ve had in mind or that I hear in my head and wish to execute successfully.

This process has been so exciting and because I’ve chosen a genre, firstly that I love and secondly where the percussion is simple yet effective throughout, it’s been something I’ve been able to manage on my own throughout the project, which has been so rewarding when listening back to the final mix and a great sense of achievement.

Rather than just an electronic track, as stated in the project scope, I wanted to try and use the studio recording skills I have developed during my time at SAE as much as possible by recording as much percussion as I could in the studio. So I had a few percussion instruments at home, for example, tambourine, clave, chimes, cabasa, wood block, finger clicks and claps which I processed and sampled out using Protools and imported to Ableton. I also decided on hiring some congas to record a nice deep rhythm throughout in the song ‘Twilight’. My Dad is a percussionist and played professionally in Sydney where I was born, so I got him into the studio and onto the congas to slap out a nice rhythm that I had figured out with him. Once he got into the swing of it, he had a lot of fun.

Recording the congas went well. I researched the best way to record congas and referenced a great ‘Sound on Sound’ article called ‘Recording Latin Percussion’. I took away some tips re. microphone choice and placement and also compression and EQ during processing. I used a couple stereo pair of C414 as overheads and an AKG D112 dynamic underneath between the congas to capture that bottom-end resonance from the drums. We did a couple recordings of the entire track and once at the editing stage in Protools I had a close listen and after a little EQ and compression picked out the best fills to add to the mix over in Ableton. After adding some tasteful reverb parameters to the track they began sounding close to what I had imagined so was very happy with the result. I ended up removing every second fill as I preferred not to hear it every bar of the track, it was a bit too much I think. So all in all, it was quite time consuming however gave me a challenge that I really enjoyed as part of the production process for this project.

I really enjoyed experimenting with the chimes samples I made and in the track ‘Dream’ I tried reversing these samples and adding reverb and it made such a nice transition between new sections where instruments are introduced or removed etc.

Once the chord progression was recorded via the piano, an arrangement was set in place and basic percussion added, I was ready to start writing melodies with this fantastic layered pan flute (breathy ‘noise’ parameter in Massive) and a pluck lead patch that I’d researched and created using the Massive plugin. This was my first time using Massive in my own project so there was lots to revise from last trimester with regards to synth programming, but once I had the sounds I wanted and tweaked them accordingly I gave myself the official green light to go ahead with writing the melodies.

As these tracks do not feature any vocals, I kept them as instrumentals, so I wanted the melodies (like in a lot of Kygo’s music) to really stand out, have an edge, a level of syncopation to the chord structure and be positioned right at the front of the mix, as a vocal typically would. Writing melodies is definitely my forte when when it comes to the writing process. Give me a chord progression and melodic rhythms just seem to flow out. Then I add the harmonies after that and they are usually a major third above the melody however sometimes I would put them down the octave to widen the melodic spectrum which really worked well and sounded great when repeating a melodic phrase in order to change it up a bit for the listener.

Bass lines, again, they are simply build based on the chord progression the same way the left hand plays the bass note of the chords you play on a piano. So that was fairly straight forward. In ‘Twilight’ I experimented with some octave movement in the bass line to funk it up a little, which sounded great. I also researched how to make a bass drop in Massive which you hear numerous times throughout my three tracks. I wanted to keep certain sounds similar across each the tracks so that the listener feels that they link together in some way as an overall EP.

The next area that I had a lot of fun with and which was absolutely necessary was the wonderful use of automation. EQ sweeps using automation is something that I believe really makes an electronic track. When they are added tastefully they create all kinds of beautiful movement within in your track, and I especially found it great to use it during a break down in the song or at a time when you introduce or fade out certain instruments. Playing around with these settings took a very long time but once you hit the right spot, you know it’s right.

Many hours were spent just plainly sitting back and just listening to the tracks, whether you lie back on the bed looking away from the computer or even walk into a different room so you can hear it from a distance. It’s amazing what sticks out when you walk away from the computer, making it easier to figure out what else you may need to tweak or change.

Once I was happy with the tracks and the mix, I was a little concerned with my levels in Ableton. This is something that I’m always cautious of as you can get a track sounding great however some tracks with the Massive plugin in use were peaking and I was getting pops and clicks through my monitors. Using a limiter on the master track fixed this problem and created a ceiling so that the tracks no longer continued to peak too high.

The tracks then had to be exported from Ableton and imported into Protools for final mixdown. As each track is stereo I had to split them to mono for final mixdown on the C75 desk, which I’m really looking forward to. Will be great hearing the tracks on some bigger and better monitors in the control room at uni and tweaking anything I need to from there before recording the final mixdown back into Protools for a final stereo bounce out.

This is my very first solo produced EP and I’ve loved every moment, from deciding on the chord progressions on the piano to choosing rhythms, sound design and synth programming, recording live percussion instruments, writing melodies and harmonies and adding filter sweeps and bass drops, it’s been exciting and far beyond anything I expected to achieve. After not knowing where to even start when it came to software based producing, to be writing music is a dream come true and only the beginning of an exciting creative journey ahead.