Ski Lift- "Give It Up" (My Process)

I'm a little late on blogging this, but this past year, I produced an album with my good friend Trey (Ski Lift).  It was a long distance collaboration that was done mostly through email.  He would send me tracks, and I would add to them.  For most of the songs, he had written and recorded the core of the song already, but wanted me to hype them up a bit, and then mix them.  

Oddly enough, this has become the norm for how I work on projects.  Bands will send me an Mp3 of an idea, and then I try to fill them out.  The benefit of this, is that I get to keep my own schedule, and work the hours that I want to alone.  I'm a lot less self-conscious when I work alone, and I usually feel a lot more inspired.  But it takes a lot of courage for a band to give me free reign over a song.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for the client who is able to hand over control to someone who lives in another state.  The process can be very rewarding when it works.  As a self proclaimed micro-manager, I have a very hard time handing my stuff over to anyone, even for mixing or mastering.  Trey is a micro-manager as well, and I commend him for letting go of some of that for this project.  

Above, is the song, "Give It Up" (you have to skip ahead to track three).  Some of you might remember this from the first Red Velvet dress line promo video.

Most of what you hear was already written and recorded before I got my hands on it.  Trey is a great songwriter, but he also has a great mind for production.  Most of the parts were already great.  If memory serves, Trey had some temporary electronic drums in there as a placeholder for the time being.  I wanted to make the song much more "vibe-y", so I deleted them and started recording some drum ideas of my own.  I remember that I wrote an entire blog post about working on these drum sounds, you can read that post here.

Here are some of the drums soloed:

Drummm

You may or may not be able to tell, but there are actually several full drum takes blended together.  Many times I will just record a bunch of ideas separate, and then stack them.  This allows me to get a more "layered" sound on the snare- which I like.

Bass and Crumar were added, but I won't spend time on that right now.

The EP is both fun and epic.  You can listen to it here:

http://skilift.bandcamp.com/album/romantic-ep

I'm very proud of this collaboration, though the greatness of it lies more in the songwriting than in anything I contributed.  Give it a listen!  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

PS.  If you are interested in hiring me to do this type of thing, you can email me at band@jeremylarsonmusic.com .  When the new site is up, I will post a price sheet for collaborative work.

Comments

[Jacob]

how soon will the new site be up?