The 3 main stages of a production - A personal approach - Examples over a pop song.

Hello Steemit!

So , it's saturday and I'm in for a stormy day so i'll pretty much be in my studio recording a couple projects I need to deliver , I'm on the last track of an album for an Ecuadorian band called ''Aire de Golfo'' in which pretty much I am in charge of the whole guitar orchestration of the album.. just one more tune and it's ready for release! Excited for that!

But , today I wanted to share a quick 3-step example of how I usually handle productions online , most of this work is handled at a distance since I prefer to work from my studio , with my gear, my tools and on my schedule :D . Yay for self employment! hehehehe

My personal studio... on a nicer day of course.. now it is raining...

So .. let's break it down into 3 quick steps:

1. Getting the song template , recruiting a team.

So, whenever I do one of these distance sessions I need a team , at least one other person who is on the actual physical location of where the client is . This other person should also be a producer and be able to talk about the initial details of the song , choose a style , direction, negotiate , etc. Once that is set down I ask for a template of the song , this could go from just a guitar/piano performance with a guide vocal take to a more structured session with some pre-programmed elements.

This varies from producer to producer and it can end up in me building up the initial session guideline or that being sent to me so I can start recording on top.

In the case of Sergio Vivar , he usually sends me the preprogrammed session , with a separate vocal track and some song references.. this is what he sent me this time ( not revealing the name of the song or the artist since this is still unreleased).

So... the main reference pointed to me for guitar approach was:

Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman

So , in a nutshell : minimal , old school sounding and very focused on ambients ... This looked like a job for my telecasters... good.. off to work!

2. Sending a first batch of instrumentation , setting up the general sound direction.

So, after testing out a couple ideas I ended up using my Tribe Telecaster for the whole thing , it's not so polite sound worked for this tune , I went for lightly distorted sounds set up with quite a bit of spring reverb and certain parts also have some tremolo going on to help make the space feel wider.

This was my first batch of guitars , sent with reference sound built with plug-ins , these will get reamped and recorded later.

3. Adding the rest of the elements and mixing.

Once we have some back and forth with the other producer, in this case Sergio, we start adding all the elements needed, extra guitars if needed , vocals , programmings , etc etc... we start narrowing it down to the final product. This particular point is the longest one in this process and just going over all the details in this one would take me a a couple posts (coming eventually) but I wanted to show you how it came together in three steps , the first template contains the same tracks used in this one.. it was just building up over it.

Do you spot all the elements from the first example to the last one?
Do you have a personal approach for online productions?

Thanks for reading!