SugarHill Week 2 & Workshop

Over the weekend Brooks and I attended a workshop at SugarHill Studios on the production of southern hip-hop with producer Allen "Ayyell" Gibson.  We started out by creating the drums with something that I have really never used, which was a circular drum sequencer as opposed to a linear one. The app which was called "Patterning" was pretty cool because you could visualize the drums in the way that they are looped throughout the beat. I think that more software should incorporate this type of sequencer. 

Using this non-linear sequencer, we made a few variations of beats. We started off with one beat and made another variation with the same rhythm with more energy which we called the turn-up beat. We also made another slower beat and a turn-up version of that. I liked that we made more than just one beat. What I usually do is I will make the drums and then make unique patterns that will change up slightly but I really liked this other method of making variations.

After importing all of the drums and making a few slight changes, we started working on a melody. This was probably my favorite part. He started off by laying a few chords out and he explained his reasoning for his chord progression. To create tension he started off with a chord that was distant from the root note of the scale. By doing this and ending his progression off with a chord on the root note, he created tension and movement in the track. He also made another variation of the chords where he raised the energy by using inverted chords. During this time the Big Chester had come up with a melody for the hook. Which gave Allen something to build on. In the hook, he wanted to emphasize the word crown. He did this by taking the chord that was played under it and built side melodies upon it. I liked how he used the beat to tell a story.

On Wednesday, we came in to give them feedback about the workshop. We told them what we liked about it and what we would want for future workshops. We also got to watch Ryan work through an album from a rock band that he's working with. I have never seen so many files on one project it was quite amazing to see all the takes from one album on a single project file.

First Day at SugarHill

This Wednesday, was the first day that Brooks and I went to our internship at SugarHill Recording Studios! We started off by watching Ryan, who is one of the guys that we will be working with, work on a music video that one of his friends in L.A. had sent to have mixed. I really liked the music as well as the visuals. As soon as the song is released, I'm going to add it to my playlist! After he finished, we followed him into a separate part of the studio which is used more for production and mixing. They showed us the program that they mainly use (Protools). Both Brooks and I thought that using their software would be really hard at first. However, to our surprise, we were able to get the basics down pretty quickly. Once we had walked through everything, we tried mixing a beat that someone had sent into the studio. In order to mix and master the track we used many different virtual plugins such as compressors, equalizers, and limiters. It was a really cool experience to be able to take what I do for a hobby at home go to a place where professionals do the same thing. I can’t wait to go back next week!