CALIFORNIA FOREVER: UPDATE

As this past month was pretty slow with live music, I took advantage of the time to work on my upcoming song, “California Forever”.

It’s crazy how that song came such a long way. I’ve programmed everything and tracked bass in my “home studio”, if you’d consider calling that a computer, audio interface and MIDI controller: by no means I’m a studio engineer, although I know the very basic ropes.

Once I had the super rough draft of the song, I got in touch with Mike Post from MooseCat Studios in LA: I’ve been working with Mike on a few productions before, so once I sent him the rough stems, I went down to his studio to re-amp the bass parts and process the other tracks.

He did a great job on the bass and in enhancing the electronic drums, synths and piano parts, as well as editing: the thing is, the song has an orchestral section, and since I’ve been using the basic Logic Pro’s library plugins for that, and there was no way to make them sound realistic, I realized I needed a different approach, in order to make the orchestra come to life. Initially I considered hiring a real orchestra, I also hired Sebastian Chang, Louisville Orchestra’s director ,to score the parts (which he did egregiously), but I soon realized it would have been financially prohibitive, so after some research, I found Felipe “Milk” Santana on Fiverr.

Felipe is a sound engineer for Universal Music Malaysia, and after vetting some of his work, I decided to use his services: he really used his expertise in order to render a realistic orchestra. I was very happy with the result, the dynamics and emotionality of each of the components, violins, timpani, trombones, cellos and basses felt 100% organic, so once I got the stems from him, I personally mixed them with the rest of the instruments: I finally had a proper rough mix, and to test it, I’ve been doing a mastering test with an online mastering service.

We’re very, very close to the final product: and although the whole project has been pretty expensive, not only in terms of money, but time and effort, I feel like it was worth it.

As of now, I’m in the process of looking for a mastering engineer, and since I learned from my mistakes that being “cheap” amounts to nothing in the industry of today, I’ve been working my ass off at my restaurant job in order to afford a professional: I’m looking at engineers that worked on big productions, such as Game Of Thrones, Broadway plays and other famous artists, to ensure the quality of my product will be 100% industry compliant.

I also started working at a campaign for the song release, or at least I made somewhat of a plan: trying to check all the points in my checklist, content, social media etc..

The song will come out this Fall. I’m nurturing the hope of it making an impact somehow, at least in the niche of bass - centered music.

Stay tuned!