Studio Baby

Credits

Production: Mixer Jaëxx
Album: Sound-sized Treats

Mastering: Mixer Jaëxx
Copyright: Mixer Jaëxx, U.S. Copyright Office, 2018

Creation

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Studio Baby was the second-to-last song to be created for Sound-sized Treats. My first child was just born a week after I started creating this song. I would keep the violin instrument active in the studio hardware and, when it was time to feed my son a bottle, I would play some violin melodies for him letting him know it was time to eat. 

Once he turned a month old, I recorded him in the AKG Perception 200 studio mic. One of the recordings was burping him after giving him a bottle. I ended up using one of his “burpies” in place of the snare drums for the song. I automated the reverb using a random low frequency oscillator (LFO) to give it an evolving quality. 

The ending of the song is special because his laugh is actually his first-ever laugh. I had taken a photo of him on Easter, trying to get him to smile. He ended up knocking an Easter basket over which caused him to laugh. Because I had taken a photo of him right as it happened with my iPhone, the audio of his laugh was captured as a “LivePhoto” and later the audio was used in the song.

The melody is comprised of a few pianos, such as a Rhodes MkII, grand piano, violin and some synths. Each is playing the same melody, although the melody is tweaked for each… either subtly or more aggressively. 

Probably the most interesting musical element of this song, besides the “burpies”, would be the bass. The bass was originally just the kick drum of the Kong drum machine. I didn’t like how it sounded, however, and was going to scrap it in favor of doing a bass-line from a bass guitar or synth. Since I didn’t have a bass melody created yet, I simply placed the MIDI notes of the kick drum on a synth bass. I ended up really liking the result and played around, creating an instrument (via a Combinator device) that took the original kick to a whole new level. 

I created the bass device by layering up multiple virtual ID8 (“rompler”) devices together and panned them in different parts of the stereo field. I added some reverb and some stereo-widened delay to the device. I then automated the amount of widening that happens to the device at different parts of the song. I essentially used the same process for creating some of the bass-lines for the songs in my Bradenton Ambient album.

This bass absolutely changed the entire character of the song. It took a complete 180 from what I originally intended it to be.

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Recording artist & producer.