Pre - Production Assignment

planned project.

ERE - Juan Karlos

a song cover

Project Statement

When ERE came out back in 2023, I'd say I was pretty late to the party in listening to the song. I never really listened to much of Juan Karlos' work, I found his original Buwan song plenty overrated and practically the only song of his that I listened to a lot in the past was Demonyo, but that was back in 8th grade! It also didn't help that I couldn't reach Buwan's higher notes, unfortunately.

So I stuck to what I could sing best, for the most part, Rex Orange County! An artist who's songs, surprisingly, I could sing perfectly! It's pretty cool actually, as if his music was made for my type of voice, pitch and all! But enough Rex glazing, let's talk deeper about singing and ERE.

Rex Orange County performs at O2 Academy Brixton on November 26, 2019 in London, England. CREDIT: Burak Cingi/Redferns

I never really embraced singing as more than just a hobby but I definitely had my fair share of experience singing, I mean, I'm Filipino right? Singing stereotypically runs in our veins, even more so for my family as I come from an actual line of good singers! It's kind of a chip on my shoulder really, everyone was always better than me at singing, so I felt like I sort of had to prove myself? There wasn't really much fight I could bring with Rex's music when my mother could belt out some powerful vocal projection with Shirley Bassey's Never Never Never (1973). Or my sister could sing the certified "pangbirit", Alicia Keys' If I Ain't Got You (2009), both solo and as a duet with someone else!

Cue me finally discovering ERE and I was initially unfazed. Oh, another JK song that I probably wouldn't be able to reach... okay? I continued to think like that, until I actually finally decided to try singing it during a pool party vacation with my family at a privately-rented resort to celebrate my big brother's long awaited homecoming. To cut a long story short, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could actually reach the more vocally intense parts of the song! Y'know, the borderline screaming, chest-voice belting, emotionally weighty part of the song! So, yeah, I guess that's why I want to sing a cover of it? I want to showcase that. Apologies for being overly dramatic about answering why I'm going to sing a cover of a song... 💀😅

Project Plan

It's a song cover, so no additional songwriting will be necessary. The lyrics have already been written, so no issue there. The instruments might be a bit more complicated for me, but I'll manage, and I'll go into more detail about that down below. My computer and recording setup are already raring to go, so given that I have everything I need, I'll be able to complete everything in a pretty timely manner.

Below is a timetable for the project:

This is what I imagine how this recording project will turn out. Each activity has been organized with assumptions of overlapping activities within each week. The colors slowly going red are to signify the approaching deadline, so y'know, it feels more urgent the closer it gets. I would also like to mention that the instrument set up and recording may take longer than everything else, depending on any issues that I might face.

Chronologically, the plan I have so far is:

Instruments Setup
1. Await for the arrival of newly ordered acoustic strings for my guitar.
2. Listen and split the song into: guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.
3. Recreate the bass and drums on FL Studio.
4. Re-string my acoustic.
Recording
1. Record the guitar section.
2. Layer guitar section with bass and drums.
3. Record vocals while listening to guitar + bass + drums.
Mixing
1. Figure out the essential stuff for mixing in FL Studio.
2. Mix the vocals, guitar, drums, and bass using FL Studio.
3. Tweak the levels and the equalizer.
4. Adapt from here what other tweaks to make it sound the best it can. (Compression, Reverb, etc.)
5. Export.
3D Animation for Music Video (Optional)
1. Record a greenscreen of my virtual avatar, ultra key the greenscreen in video editing software.
2. Create a simple looking room similar to JK's official live performance music video in Blender.
3. Insert greenscreened video of my virtual avatar.
4. Animate the camera and my virtual avatar's position to mimic the official live performance.
5. Render.
6. Layer the music and the video in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Publishing
1. Make sure that everything is exported into a neat file that isn't an obscure file type. MP4 for video, and MP3 for music.
2. Post the video/music on YouTube.
  - Should I forgo the animation video part, create a cover art for the music.
3. Configure the post properly to include proper credits, and signify in the title that this is a cover song.
4. Profit? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Logistics

As noted above, I will try to perform all the instruments myself, whether in real life (guitar), or digitally using FL Studio. It still needs to be stated however, that if I find that I do not have enough time to include everything, I might have to forgo some of the instruments entirely. I'm keeping myself flexible so that this project doesn't crash and burn a horrible death! As much as possible though, I'll try to keep within the lines that I've set for myself.

Production Area.

Everything will be conducted in a corner of my room where my computer setup is located. My room is on the second floor of our quaint little townhome unit. The room itself isn't really sound treated, so if I pick a particularly bad time of day to record, well, I'll have to re-record the guitar and vocal sections. Thankfully, since my house is in a pretty secluded village (think of a village inside of another village), I'm not really too worried about the hustle and bustle of the outside world.

The room itself has air-conditioning via a window-type aircon, so I'm safe from melting, but it's quite noisy, so I'll record without it on. The electric fan will be quite audible as well, so I'd turn that off once I begin recording. Below are some pictures of my room:

Equipment.

For the most part, I plan to work with what I already have. I mean, I'm a full time student with a relatively poor family (trust me, I got my setup by sheer luck through a crypto side hustle during the pandemic; ever heard of Axie Infinity?) but that's a whole can of worms I don't really plan to get into.

Microphone - Samson Q2U
Physical Instrument - (Old) White Davis Acoustic Guitar
Audio Interface - None 💀
Speakers - Samsung HW K20 | ReDragon Zeus H510
Digital Audio Workstation - AMD Ryzen 7 Windows PC | FL Studio | OBS | Blender (optional)

The list above are the essential equipment I will be using, I think I've done a great job enumerating their uses in the Project Plan section. I think FL Studio will do a LOT of carrying for this project, especially with its ability to let me create an arrangement for virtual instruments. I don't really have physical drums, nor a bass guitar to use. As mentioned by Prof. Librero in his own sample ePortfolio, fortunately, having real vocals and guitars recorded will be sufficient enough in meeting the requirements of the MMS 172 final project!

Signal Flow.

Due to my reliance on FL Studio's FLEX plugin to virtually play the drums and bass parts of the song as well as the fact that I've forgone the use of an Audio Interface, my signal flow is pretty simple.

I do have to note about my microphone, it is both a USB and an XLR mic, so I won't really encounter any major issues working without an audio interface, nor will the sudden presence of one ruin everything either. For both the vocals and the acoustic guitar, I will be recording them separately through my microphone. However, I'm debating on whichever recording software I will use. I was initially planning on using OBS, however it came to my attention that I can record natively in FL Studio, so I'll be figuring all of that out.

On a side note, I don't think I'll be able to recreate the drums and bass of the song fully, so I'll probably go and create some simple drum loop, and just have the bass follow the guitar a couple octaves lower or something.

Self - Reflection

To be honest, this is the first time I will ever be doing any of this. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've recorded myself playing the guitar and singing, but I've never tried to go about it professionally. I haven't even used FL Studio to produce outputs for any of my school works yet, this'll be my first. Hopefully, my experience in doing other kinds of outputs, video and audio, will help me tremendously here as I've done voiceovers, podcasts, videogame YouTube content, and even livestreaming.

Admittedly however, I am scared. While I do think that I sing pretty okay normally, I have some pretty bad self-esteem and anxiety issues when recording. I often get inside my own head and overthink about how my voice sounds, and the anxiety makes my voice waver. It's kind of ironic actually, a VTuber like myself feeling this way, but I mean, I don't know. I feel like talking like I normally do is pretty easy, but once it clicks inside my head that I'm actually performing something, the jitters get to me. I'll try my best to rein myself in so that I manage to output something I can be proud of, and I mean, I'll be posting it on my YouTube channel as well, so I sure do hope I perform well!

As for everything else, the only glaring issue that I'll be facing apart from the previously mentioned performance anxiety, is juggling all of my workloads. I'm planning to stay ahead of the curve by doing most of my school works earlier now, but the issue is sometimes the professors just don't provide the tasks early, so I'll just be doing my own thing and suddenly I'm blindsided by a big project or assignment out of nowhere. Needless to say, I'm still very thankful to Prof. Librero for providing all of the tasks early. So at least I can effectively plan my way around his class! I think I'll end my blog here, if you've managed to get all the way down here, I appreciate ya! Could I trouble you to give me a little subscribe?

(For context, I just took a free beat online here, did not compose the music myself.)

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse