Creator Diaries: Part 4 - How I Release Music

MK8 Love has finally landed and the feeling I got on the day of its release will stay with me forever. The song has its issues, and I don’t want to shy away from that. But I love what I have created, and I loved the process of recording my own song and working with my producer to achieve a lifelong goal of mine – to see my own music on Spotify.

In this blog series, I want to share my experiences of creating music as a young, new musician. The series will track the process of creating my first song from conception to release. Through sharing my processes and experiences the aim is that artists and new musicians can find confidence, guidance, support and company in some of their musical challenges. I am by no means an expert in this, and I don’t want to pretend to be. I merely hope that my experiences can help other musicians who want to get their music out there and create the music they love. In this fourth post, I’d like to detail my experiences recording MK8 Love, what the process of production looked like and the artist-producer relationship, and how I went about releasing the track. But before reading, why not give MK8 Love a listen?

Recording

I loved recording. I loved helping setup the equipment, getting ready to sing, and doing take after take. It showed me that, if I could have this as my life everyday, I would. I was nervous at first because I was unsure about my singing ability and how I would sound when recorded, but having made songs at home I knew I could record something that I would be happy with. It was also encouraging having a lot of reassurance from my producer, and the fact that we are good friends meant that the whole experience was more a fun day of hanging out than anything else.

Throughout the day I learned that I am a consistent singer, and can repeat the same thing I’ve sung accurately, which is apparently quite useful for producers when trying to edit vocals and double tracks! I also learned that recording benefits from strong enunciation, even when it may not be wanted from a creative perspective. This is so that greater clarity is heard, and the editing process can provide the intended creative effect. For example, when I sung the line “1, 2, 3 you don’t know bout me”, my producer told me to make sure those numbers and consonants are heard sharply to provide power and clarity.

We weren’t able to get everything I wanted recorded, and I think my vision of the song suffered slightly because of that. A key takeaway from recording was that vocal warmups are incredibly important. I could tell I was struggling more to get the power and pitching I wanted during the first half of the day. Whereas my vocals were more powerful and I felt more confident in my singing as the day went on, and this is definitely reflected in the released song, from first to second half.

Part of working with a producer is about making compromises. When I played the riff that goes over the Fmaj7-Gmaj(add4)-Emin7-Fmaj progression, my producer said, “oh that sounds a bit harsh, make the first note an E”. Although this doesn’t sound like a big change, it was quite a strong departure from the intentional “clashy” sound of the flattened 7^th I had envisioned to get away from it sounding too cheesy and popish. However, when you’re working with someone who has experience mixing, producing and a good ear, sometimes it’s best to acknowledge that their opinion may be better. And of course, no one will know that it was ever any different except you, so you just have to come to terms with it. The final result showed that it didn’t impact the music in any detrimental way.

This goes back to my first Creator Diaries post about whether I’m making music for myself or for others. I wanted to make music that I wanted to listen to, and I had a strong creative vision. But, as with all media or creative content, it’s important to have another informed opinion there to either reign in your sometimes crazy ideas, or just provide perspective of what people will want to listen to. I suppose it’s not so much about giving up on making music for yourself but being open for the music you make to be developed, refined and improved.

Production

I was extremely lucky to have my producer produce my track for free. I know music production is an expensive business (I suppose that’s why record labels exist), so I realise how lucky I am to be able to get a track produced for free.

In one quick burst in May, the production began and ended within a week. That one week was filled with a lot of back-and-forth voicenotes, lots of initial mixes, and a lot of idea sharing.

When I heard the first mix, I was quite shocked at the raw state of it and I was surprised by how quiet it was. Although it was quite bare and quiet, it also sounded very clean, and it showed me the disparity between my demo songs and professional mixes. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted - I wanted the track to pack a punch and have the listener really feel it. But the instrumentation felt a little tepid, and the mix was so quiet it was difficult to get an idea of how that would translate when the final mix and master had increased volume. I also felt as if there were too many gaps where not enough was happening, as if the track had run stale in some parts.

Though there were signs of what I envisioned. Especially clear was how clean and spacious the vocals sounded. I was a huge fan of the vocals from the outset, but I noticed that in the early half of the song that there were two vocals lines where it sounded like I was almost going out of pitch. While I don’t think I necessarily go out, I do feel that it doesn’t sound quite right and annoyingly, this is more because I lacked energy when recording rather than an issue that can be solved in production. Because we had so few takes as recording had to be a rushed process, we had to work with what we had. It taught me that energy can often be more important than getting everything perfect in recording, because dips in pitch can be amended in production, whereas energy cannot be created.

My main things to address from the first mix were the lack of rhythmic interest in the song, the missing instrumentation (which I wasn’t overly concerned about as that would be easily fixed), the lack of energy in certain sections that called for big developments, and some missing elements that provided foreshadowing and motifs.

Discussing this with my producer was interesting because we both knew some of these elements would come with updated mixes, but some were things I pointed out which my producer found useful to know because they hadn’t thought about it.

Drums in particular demonstrated an interesting part of the artist-producer relationship. I had in mind a rhythm I wanted for the outro and tried to beatbox it on a voicenote. My producer then tried to input the drums into a new mix, but it didn’t sound quite right. I then beatboxed it again but slower so that the individual kicks and snares could be heard more clearly. On the next mix sent over the drums sounded more similar to what I was doing, but my producer explained to me that how I wanted the drums to sound was a very “beatboxy” interpretation of it, and both the style and rhythm of what I was doing isn’t something that the drums would produce naturally in line with the song.

Another suggestion by my producer was to reduce the tempo of the song by 5bpm. This was suggested after the track had been mastered and finished. His argument was that some songs benefit from a slightly reduced tempo to allow the groove to come through more and to open space for the “earcandy” – those little sounds that fill the space and provide scale, atmosphere and depth. This one was difficult for me, as I felt the reduced tempo would impact the 80s beat too greatly and change it into a potentially chilled rock song. While I was willing to listen to creative inputs, including a decision to reduce the song length by eliminating a transition progression between the first and second sections, I think that reducing the tempo would have had too detrimental an impact on my vision for the song, and how I wanted it to be heard – as an uptempo 80s pop song.

My producer and I said we would both benefit from being able to work together on a mix in person and with a bit more collaboration. I think for my producer this arose from having a creative writing block, and without being able to truly collaborate within the time we had, we couldn’t best communicate or create what we wanted. If we were able to collaborate in person and with more time, we could have created a more cohesive vision, one that would benefit from both our input and could translate my ideas into a song that both listeners and I would love to hear.

Release

I wasn’t sure exactly when I wanted to release the song, but since it was so close to my birthday, I figured, why not just release it then? I also wasn’t sure exactly what a distributor really did.  I now understand that they simply get your music to the places you want it to go, and many people recommended going with a company called DistroKid. I don’t want to get too into different distributors, but largely they all do the same thing, with differences in what they take from you and how they get your music out there. DistroKid seemed good as it gives you the full entitlement to your royalties and charges much less to use their service.

Once I had the track ready for release, I recorded a few music videos with my sister and tried to make some social media promotional material for the song. These were put out before the song’s release to lead up to it. After the song came out, I recorded my own video of me beatboxing a section of the song with piano. These were shared on facebook and Instagram. This was all to try and promote the song in some way so that I could get the song either listened to or shared on by others.

But other than doing this, I’m not totally sure how to get my music out there. Lots of helpful articles and blogs have been written to help, including on Aux Connect, and some of those things provided good avenues like going onto music blogs and trying to get the attention of those writers, or reaching out to playlist curators to get my song on some of their lists. While I’ve tried these, so far they haven’t been overly successful and knowing how to really get music out there is proving difficult. It’s made even harder when you’re struggling just to find the time to do research and outreach. I want to keep pushing though, as I don’t want to stop making music, and I know that building a following, getting music out there and building your own music base can take time. I’ve been thinking more about how useful soundcloud and tiktok could be for me, as I believe soundcloud could help build a following by having my demos shared on there for people to see the kind of music I’m writing and making, while TikTok could provide the wide outreach.

Some of this may seem obvious, but for someone who isn’t a frequent social media user, has never released music, nor tried to promote any of their own material before, it can be quite a daunting task.

Since MK8 Love’s release, I’m constantly thinking how I would go about it next time. What will the track look like – will the track benefit from stronger, in-person collaboration with my producer, will I focus more on vocal warmups and readying myself for morning recordings, or will I even have built a greater music presence in time for another release? I can’t foresee exactly what any future tracks will look like, but I know I’m going to keep going, because releasing my first single is perhaps one of my greatest achievements so far, and I loved every second of it.