The Art of Music Production 学习记录 1

Listening Like A Producer

the ability to convey emotion through music.

Listening Emotionally
vs
Listening Technically How music made you feel

How to analyze music

Emotion

to listen harmonically and melodically and listen to the technical nuances of performance and mixing

Kinesthetic Observation Emotional Cues
like bobbing your head, tapping your foot, increase and decrease in breathing, increase and decrease in heart rate. Don’t close your eyes on the stage, you should see your audience kinesthetic response. Technical parts

All of these things are all in service of emotion, we always want to be thinking about how is this affecting the emotion of the record ?

Record performance

• Timing: playing in good, solid tempo
• Intonation, tune
• X-factor

Composition

• Melody
  is the melody doing what we want it to ?
• Harmony
  Is harmony supporting melody ?
  s all this coming together
• Lyrics
  What about the lyrics ?
  Are the lyrics as strong as they can be ?
  Are they fitting together right with the melody ?
  Is the prosody strong ?
• Form: the different elements, the different sections of the song or the composition.
  Are they coming together in the right way ?
  Do the build ?
  Do they keep us interested ?
  Do we feel as though they’re taking us on a jouney ?
  Does the chorus pay off when we get there ?
  Does the whole thing build up to some sort of a  climax that really gives us a reward for sticking around and listening to this whole piece of music ?

Production

• Vocal Placement
  Is the vocal placed in the right place vis-a-vis the other instruments ?
  How close or far away is it ?
  Is there a lot of reverb on it ? (web vocal and dry vocal)
• Intelligibility
  What about the intelligibility of the vocal ?
  Can we hear every single word of the lyrics if we want to, to be able to know what’s going on in the sotry ?
• Instruments
  What about the impact of those ?
  What’s the thump like of the kick drum, the thwack of the snare, the click of the pick on the guitar ?
  What do we want to have happen in terms of the impact of those instruments ?
• Tone
  A lot of clarity, Hi-fi
  mush all together and has them act more as a unit and be a little less defined
• Focus
  Are we giving the listener enough cues to know exactly what the focus is at any given time ?
  Where we want them to listen the most ?
  Where we want them to put their focus at any given time in the recording ?
• Effects
  Reverb, delays, distortion, they can be ear candy.
  if that’s the case, are they distracting form the focus o fthe record or are they really adding to the overall effect ?

Reference:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/producing-music