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Amanda Payne
I would like to start this post by saying the most important thing I learned this week was to consider typing my posts in a Word document FIRST in case the internet decides to poop out as I am submitting my post…again.
With that being said, Monday there was a surprise session during class. The man, Tavarus, was supposed to come into the studio on Tuesday but he was on his way to Miami so he ended up coming in Monday during class time. I could tell Phil was a little frustrated with this sudden change in plans so I was curious to see how everything would turn out. After all, this was my first hip-hop session, all my other sessions were voiceovers.
A few minutes prior to this session, Phil and I talked about the 5 most important rules for being a rapper or hip-hop artist. Here is what we came up with.
1.) Be in time- your flow must be precise on the beat and with the beat.
2.) Clarity- your words should be understood by your audience. Annunciate.
3.) Emotion- feel the music and the lyrics.
4.) Message- establish the topic and main idea of your song. Make it clear.
5.) Tone/believability- we hear you and understand your message, but do we believe you.
Tavarus, came into the studio a little after 2pm and by 2:30, Phil was started. He started by asking what tempo was preferred. Tavarus did not have a tempo so he just regurgitated the chorus while Phil tapped along on his app and worked from there. Next, he asked what key he wanted. The man had no clue what that even meant, but Phil just kept going along with the flow. Phil was asked to make a beat for this song and after a steady thirty minutes, we had a bass heavy, futuristic, booty hip-hop beat.
The song, which was titled “Swim”, started with the beat as an intro and then the chorus. A common technique is to have a single voice on the verses and a “stacked” chorus. Stacked means you simply have multiple DIFFERENT recordings of the same lines. Then you blend them a tad and play them all at once to make it sound like there are multiple of the same persons voice rather than the same exact recording duplicated and played at once which would result in just a louder version of what would sound like one voice.
Once we flew by the very well known and memorized chorus, we got to record the verses. I was very nervous when I heard how much the verse and the music did not line up. It was so fast that I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the issue was whether he wasn’t in time or if he had too many syllables or what. This is why it is critical to capture every single take, even if it is just a warm up. Phil managed to pick apart the pieces that fit out of each take and the ending result was amazingly accurate with timing. It was not the most spot on perfect recording but it was pretty close for how many issues we had. His clarity started to fade towards the end of his session but I am not sure if that was just because of his southern accent or if he was just trying to get everything to fit. Either way, it came out nicely.
Tavarus, who we now learned called himself Chickenboi, did not have any ad lib tracks so Phil took the initiative to just add some effects to fill in the blank spots. For example, he chopped part of a word and duplicated it creating a stutter effect and repeated the last phrase during a long pause.
All in all, Chickenboi had no clue what he wanted when he came in, but he loved everything he left with.
