Let's start it off with the...

Anyway, after properly tuning all of the strings, I hopped right onto YouTube to look for a guitar tutorial of Ere! I found this one tutorial that seemed pretty easy enough to do, so I started practicing!

It was actually pretty easy to remember, since it was just about around seven chords in total. After a couple of days of practicing, I was getting the hang of things, although the pain in my fingers were starting to become more apparent as the days went by. Not having my calluses felt like I was back in the old days of painful playing, gritting my teeth as I played along to whatever song I decided I wanted to learn that day.

At one point by the second week, I even looked up methods on how to develop finger calluses quicker. As it turns out, if you spray your fingers with rubbing alcohol after playing the guitar, it promotes callus development! Anyway, over the two weeks, I just kept playing whenever I had the opportunity, then sprayed my fingers in alcohol afterwards. Callus development arrived real quick right after, but I had another thing I was having trouble with. 

The chord suggested in the tutorial, G7? My hands were quite small and less agile than they used to be, so I was having trouble stretching my fingers to reach both the first fret on the high E and the third fret of the low E with my ring finger. It also didn't help that I had developed some mild carpal tunnel over the years, I guess boxing training, gaming, and productivity tasks finally took their toll on me. So instead of just waiting until my fingers got used to playing again, I looked up other tutorials, maybe find an alternative chord shape instead of the original G7, and I found one!

I liked some of the chords in this tutorial over the previous one as they were easier on my fingers, so I cherry-picked the chord shapes that I liked and slapped it on the previous tutorial's progression!

So originally, the former's progression was Cadd9 -> D -> G -> G7 with the chord shapes being like this:

But then I swapped it to something like this:

I took the new D9 chord shape from the latter tutorial, and the G7 there seemed simple enough, but it sounded kinda off to me when I played it on my end? So I looked up another guide again! This time, from the OG guitar tito tutorial guy himself!

By August 24th, I decided it was high time I recorded the guitar section of the song. Yeah, remember when I said I barely followed the schedule? I was pretty much going back and forth between the three sections here. I would set up the instrument, record it, add it to the mix in a way that sounds more pleasant, and set up the next instrument. 

For clarity's sake, the way to record directly into FL Studio is really easy. But I didn't know how to do it either in the beginning, so here's the tutorial that I myself used to learn how to do that! It's a minute and twenty three seconds, you'll be fine!

This was the final raw guitar recording I settled with, recorded straight into FL Studio, you can give it a listen down below! 

Fun fact! I don't know if it's audible or not now, but at one point in time, I accidentally recorded the guitar audio while the original Ere by Juan Karlos was blaring in my headset, and it was so loud, you could actually hear it in the microphone!

Since I now finally had something that could act like a base of sorts for the rest of the instruments, I figured I should start working on the next instrument on the metaphorical laundry list of work I have ahead. The bass guitar! Now, I say this totally unsarcastically, but who would have thought that the guy that doesn't know how to play any other instrument apart from the guitar and piano, would have a hard time charting out a bass line for a song in a digital audio workspace that he isn't familiar with!

It definitely could NOT have been me! Just kidding, it was totally me. But hey I figured it out anyway! You know what I did? Just like any normal person in the modern era would do if they didn't how to do something, I looked up a YouTube tutorial yet again! My thought process was, I'll just watch a bass guitar tutorial on YouTube, and pretend like the piano roll on FL Studio is my bass guitar and play it there!

A great thing about FL Studio however, is that it's really easy to just start inputting notes! Primarily because as soon as I started FL Studio, there's already an option to create a project with a template depending on what I needed. See that "Create a chord progression" option down below? It already comes with a piano, bass, lead & drums! So I just got rid of the piano and the lead, and voila, we've got the foundations setup to create a mix that has bass, drums, guitar, and vocals!

So let me get right back to the point, that YouTube tutorial I was talking about! This one is basically the easiest bass guitar cover that I found, and it's mostly because of the tabs present at the bottom that I could even follow along. Now, I was quite familiar with the concept that the bass didn't have the same tuning as a regular 6-string guitar's EADGBE and I was also familiar with the fact that each fret was a half step from the original note.

Why am I talking about this? Well, you see the numbers on the musical chart below?

They each signified a fret of the corresponding string! So if in the E line, there's a 3, it means that the third fret on the E string was plucked for that part of the chart! But at the same time, it also signifies that the note three half steps from the original note E was plucked too!

There's 12 notes in total, 7 major notes, and 5 minor notes. I don't know why I'm giving you a musical lesson, but here we are! For simplicity's sake, just think of it like this, the notes range from letters A to G, and some notes have a sharp or flat version of themselves. See image below.

When you say sharp, it's one half step forward of the original note, and when you say flat, it's one half step backwards the original note and they can overlap, so C sharp note is also the same as a G sharp note. So in a real use-case example, in the tutorial above, when the bass player strikes the 3rd fret on the E string, it also means he just plucked the G note!

You might be wondering why you needed to know this, and well... this is how I did the bass section of the song.

When you first open up the piano roll (it is called that because it's actually named after the original rolls of paper with specific holes in them to signify notes that piano players back in the day would actually use to play notes), you're shown something like the image above. It's quite easy to get confused, when the piano roll starts at C0 and ends at C10, these are the octaves. My personal confusion comes from the fact that I didn't know which particular note of which specific octave corresponds to what when the video just says the note itself.

The way I figured it out was just through simple trial and error. From what I've heard, anything below C3, and the bass just sounds like ominous droning rather than an actual musical note. So that's the spot I started with and worked my way up from there,  inputting in the notes! To be honest, the notes weren't really that much of a problem, I mean, the "science" isn't really all that complicated. Just look and count which note corresponds to which! There were really only two major issues about creating the bass part.

One is the timing of the actual notes themselves, there was a lot of trial and error involved in making sure that the timing was proper. You can know the notes, but if it isn't played at the right time, then you might as well be playing while deaf! The second major issue that I faced here, is the fact that this was such a tedious and mind-numbing thing to do. I had to take a lot of breaks and pace myself so that I don't burn myself out.

On a slide note (heh), did you know that you can do slide notes on the piano roll? A few of the notes in the bass line for Ere were slide notes if you take a look at the bass tutorial, so I looked it up and came across this! How to use slide notes in FL Studio!

But enough lollygagging! Here's what I ended up coming up with for the MIDI bass line on FL Studio, take a listen! But also as a side note, I didn't totally stick to only doing the bass part at this time, I also started doing the drums at some point. So I would do the bass part, make huge headway and progress, and then start up the drums section and try to catch up to the bass' progress. You can see where the bass' part starts.

It wasn't until after a while that I gave up on the drums for the time being and focused solely on the bass, you'll see why later...

And now we arrive at probably one of the most FRUSTRATING sections in the whole project. I hope you can feel the venom in my text from how annoying this was! Earlier, when I said the bass was incredibly tedious and mind-numbing? That version of me hadn't yet tried charting the beat drop for the main chorus of the song!

Imagine spending a couple hours doing the drums, making sure that each beat is in proper timing, and realizing you've only done TWENTY SECONDS of the entire song when the song is over FOUR minutes long! Yeah, that was ME. Okay, I kinda deserve it for choosing to do this and totally underestimating how hard drums actually were to chart out a MIDI for. I thought it would be something similar to making a hip-hop beat with the looping hi-hats, snares and kicks. But boy was I absolutely so WRONG!

You see, I approached the drums section with the same strategy as the method used in charting the bass guitar. You know the drill, I looked up a drum tutorial for Ere on YouTube and I found this one:

It sounded pretty good, so I started trying to chart this one down, came up onto the piano roll, and came to a realization...

So with an easy solution to my lacking drum knowledge, I started trying to correspond what the YouTube tutorial shows to what it is on the Real Drum app, and THEN input the note onto the piano roll accordingly. I thought it would be significantly easier, but then the dude playing the drums on the video started going ham on them, and I seriously couldn't follow what was happening. Even if I could follow, I didn't have even a single clue how I could convert that into the piano roll.

So I got another idea, since I had the Real Drum app anyway, why don't I look up any Ere covers that perform it on the app itself. Luckily enough, I actually found a few covers! Namely, these two:

Major problem with the left one though, it starts way later than it should, skipping over some of the beginning parts. The one on the right was the video my girlfriend said she was watching while she tried to follow along with her own Real Drum app. So what I did was, I took the beginning part of the right video, and then stuck to the left one for the most part.

I felt quite excited since it seemed like I'd finally be making progress, and I did! Until I realized that I had spent a lot of hours inputting all the notes down, and I'd still only made just about 50 seconds of actual music. It was mortifying and crushing, like fighting tooth and nail to fill a bucket with a drop of water, only to realize that I needed the entire ocean! It especially hit me when I got to the beat drop where the music finally transitions between calm and chill to loud and emotional!

I felt like a complete bumbling buffoon! The beat drop for the main chorus was so difficult to manually convert to a MIDI drum piano roll that I had to change my whole entire strategy! I think you can clearly see when the drums section transitions from MIDI piano roll to actual recording down below.

The strategy I swapped to was actually simpler than ever before. Rather than convert it to MIDI, I might as well just record myself playing the drums on the Real Drum app! But you have to keep in mind, I am by no means a pro, nor even an amateur, really. But this still beats painstakingly noting down each beat on the piano roll just to make an awkwardly done MIDI. I'm still better with my hands, than I am with a mouse. It also helps that I can actually play alongside the YouTube video, rather than going through the constant cycle of input then listen if it sounds right, then repeat ad infinitum.

If you squint a little, you might be able to see the cuts in the actual recording themselves. That's because I spliced it to make it actually sound good and on-time. I split the drums of the cover into multiple different sections, just so I could get to a part, memorize it, record it directly into FL Studio, then move on to the next part and then repeat the cycle. There was a lot of splicing involved, some actually being a lot more noticeable than others if you have a keen ear. By far, I think this is the part that took the longest amount of time to actually get done.

Here, take a listen if you'd like. You can see where the drums start. The reason it is still four minutes and forty seconds is so that it's easier to lay the instruments on top of each other when I start the mixing process.

And now we get to the final part of our recording bonanza, the vocals. This one is the part I'm not the most confident in, honestly speaking. But it's the best of all the takes I've done anyway. Seriously, I genuinely think that I've done upwards of fifty or more takes at this point.

Don't believe me? Let me show you screenshots of me scrolling through the takes that I HAVEN'T deleted. And trust me, I deleted A LOT, mostly for organization purposes. Y'know, scroll through each take, listen to what sounds good, if something doesn't sound good, it's instantly deleted.

Anyway, let's get right on to it, shall we? The method of recording was the same as the method I used to record the guitar audio, so no worries there, all that changed was instead of the mic being pointed at the guitar, it was now pointed at my mouth. (It's a dynamic microphone, Samson Q2U USB/XLR.) Otherwise, it's still the same way of recording directly into FL Studio.

I don't even know what advice I can give here, but what I can tell you is what I did! I listened to the song while I recorded myself singing, and I recorded during the middle of the day, so at the very least, if I was gonna bother the neighbors with my obnoxiously loud singing it'd be when the sun's out and they're actually awake. 

Another thing to keep in mind, in both the recording for guitar and my vocals, I was extremely cautious with background noise. This means that I recorded with almost everything off. No air conditioner, no electric fan, no people in the house except me, the glass windows were closed off tight, all my doors were closed. Everything to ensure even just a teeny tiny bit of audio improvement through the removal of as many sources of noise as possible. There might still be an audible buzzing or whirring sound in the background, but that most likely might be my computer's fans, and I can't really remove that.

So here, take a wee gander at my vocal recording including the second voices I did. No edits or effects in place as per usual with all the other previously shown raw recordings.

Do keep in mind, however, that even if I don't like how I sound here (perhaps a consequence of having to constantly listen to my own singing voice every day for a week or two straight), this vocal recording has gone through quite a rigorous selection process! 

If you take a look real closely, you can see that a lot of the different cut recordings have differing names, that is because this one, just like the drum recording, was spliced together. All the best parts of some of my takes, finished or not, taken to be combined and form one unanimous whole. Best might be subjective here, because it was only me that listened to all the takes.

However! I'd like to give proper credit to my sisters, mother, and my lovely girlfriend for assisting me with this project! Assist in the sense that I had them listen to the recordings and tell me what they found wrong, what needed fixing. This is because sometimes, you need fresh ears to listen to your work too so that you can accurately pinpoint where some parts need improving!

And I'm actually pretty glad that I had my family and girl help me with this, because for the most part, they were quite brutally honest with what needed fixing! Saying things like:

Needless to say, I was definitely humbled, but also, this was a really great opportunity to correct some of my previous recording errors. My family has never really been the type to sugarcoat things, they wouldn't tell me it sounds good if it sounded horrible, they'll say it right to my face, "ano ba yan Jot, ang panget ng boses mo!"

So now that we've gone through and acquired all the pieces of Exodia, it's time to assemble the pieces all together in...

We're basically at the home stretch for this, everything has been assembled, and all we need to do now is to make sure that they all blend well together! And remember, I mentioned earlier that I've been moving back and forth between setting up instruments, recording, and mixing! Since the guitar section was the first instrument I finished, I immediately went to applying some appropriate mixing filters just to improve the quality of its sound played solo as well as later on when I finished with the bass and drums, played together.

So let's discuss that! But first, I have to tell you how to actually input effects onto the track so that you can follow along! It's actually a lot simpler than you might think.

First, in your mixing tab, click on the track that you'd want to apply effects to.

Now let's get right on to the instruments!

Guitars are the middle range instruments that provide the song with rhythm, warmth and depth. So the first effect I applied onto it was some good ole equalizer! Equalizers are useful because not only can you use it to boost certain frequencies to make it pop right out from the rest, you can also use it so that you can make sure it doesn't muddy the other instruments' frequencies. Think about it, if I didn't decrease the lower frequencies of the guitar track, then wouldn't it clash with the Bass guitar track, which thrives in the lower ends of the frequency spectrum?

Compressors are another great effect to apply! They can be used to smoothen out an audio track, whether it by via throttling the higher highs, or increasing the lower lows. What I mean by this is that it makes the audio more consistent, making the rhythm more steady! This is because in the original raw recordings, there were some parts where I strummed the strings too loud, while other times, I strummed them too softly.

And finally, Reverb is another great addition to the effects in the mixing tab. Like I said, guitars do provide songs with warmth and depth, so adding some subtle reverb gives the guitar slightly more oomph to it without sounding really flat or glassy and at the same time, create a sense of space for the listener with all that echoing going around! 

Can you hear the difference between this, and the guitar take without any edits? I'm sure you can, because now it's actually much more audible at normal volume levels, and you don't have to crank it all the way to max audio just so you can hear a single note!

The next instrument that I applied effects to was the bass guitar!

Bass Guitars aren't only just for those cool intricate and funky bass lines you hear in most tracks, albeit they're definitely iconic in that way too! Kool & The Gang's Hollywood Swinging comes to mind for some of the funkiest tracks I've ever heard, and keep in mind I heard that song when I was a little child playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and I STILL remember it! 

Bass guitars also more often than not, serve a far more foundational role in one's track. Remember earlier, I mentioned that I cut the lower frequencies of my acoustic guitar via equalizer? This is because the lower frequencies are the bass guitar's domain! Sure, the lower E and A strings of the guitar may have some degree of bass to them, but if I kept them, it would just end up muddying the sound overall!

So with that in mind, the first effect that I applied to the bass guitar was, of course, an equalizer. Since the lower frequencies were king on the bass, I put a high-shelf pass around the 90Hz section, then slightly boosted the 250Hz as seen in the image down below. I wanted to make sure that the bass was strong and distinct, but I didn't want to make it super overpowering.

Next, the compressor! Now you might think, but isn't the bass guitar on MIDI? Like, would this not mean that there wouldn't really be much, if any, varying highs and lows? And usually you'd be right, but you see, while making the bass guitar piano roll, I adjusted the control velocity for most of the notes! This basically just means that I increased the volume that the note is played, so as to emulate the ramping intensity of the song's music.

And finally, we arrive at the last effect for bass, the chorus! You might be wondering, why chorus instead of reverb? I'd say that's a real good question! You see, normally, we'd think giving reverb here to give the bass some space, would be a great addition as it would theoretically give it a sort of booming quality. But that's kind of the main problem, we have to remember that we're trying to make everything blend well with mixing. Using reverb on lower frequencies tends to muddy everything up, resulting in kind of a boomy mess. Chorus, on the other hand, gives the bass sort of a similar effect to reverb, without overwhelming the lower frequency. Like, it provides the bass with a little more width and richness, without necessarily nuking the deeper notes!

Although it's also worth noting that I only applied it here subtly, so honestly, it might not even be that noticeable! But I guess you can be the judge of that, here, take a listen and try to pinpoint the difference.

Alright, let's keep it moving now. The last instrument we haven't tackled yet is the drums!

The Drums carry not just the rhythm but also the entire energy of the piece! You ever notice how some chill music covers of normally intense songs have barely any drums? Or an entirely re-arranged, softer version of the original composition? This is why!

And surprisingly, for quite an intricate instrument that was the object of my anger and frustration during the course of this project, I didn't need to use that many effects on it! Really, I only used two effects in total: equalizer and compressors!

If you haven't been paying attention, it's okay, I understand, I'd start dissociating too after reading all of my yapping. The reason we'll be using an equalizer here is to cut out the frequencies that overpowers the sections of the other instruments, and boost the ones that let the drums shine in its own way! For example in the image below, I boosted the lower rumble to give the kick some more oomph, lowered the pressure, and boosted the stroke too to make the hi-hats and snare just a tad bit more audible.

I like to think that this levels system is basically just how the normal equalizer looks like, the left most being the lowest frequency, and as it moves to the right, the higher the frequency it is, excluding the output volume, obviously.

The compressor is literally just there to normalize the drums' dynamic range. I don't know if you've noticed, but in the drum take, you can hear that some of the snare hits, hi-hats, kicks, or whatever else all didn't have the same consistent loudness. So by applying a compressor, we can level it out this way. Boosting the lower volume hits, and throttling the higher volume beats!

And now we're finally at the vocals section of the mixing! This one is actually another section where my family helped me with keeping what works, and fixing what didn't! ...do I also need to describe the vocals' role in the track? Alright, fine!

Vocals, as we all know, is pretty much the centerpiece of most tracks, although I do need to say that this isn't always the case. Anyway, we need to be real careful with how we mix the vocals here, because this is quite honestly one of the most volatile aspects of mixing from my experience. You have to keep in mind that no matter how good the instruments sound, if the vocals suck, if they can't cut through and shine WITH the music, the whole song kind of falls flat! The same argument goes for the other way around, if the vocals cut through the music too much, it can make the whole song feel disjointed, like if you just played a backing track and sung over it, and let me tell you, it is QUITE noticeable.

Do you wanna know how I can say this? Because this was actually my main issue with my vocals. I remember Prof Librero talking about how if we don't mix the vocals well, our vocals could end up being overwhelmed by the instruments, thereby making our voice barely audible in the mix. So you know, resident overthinker over here, I made sure that my vocals were strong, and loud! So now I had the same issue but on the opposite side of the spectrum; that is, my vocals were too strong that it kept overpowering the music! These were the main criticism actually from my family. See screenshot below:

First, you already know what it is, bring your hands together for our beloved: the equalizer! This time, instead of using the Fruity Parametric EQ 1 or the YouLean Simple EQ, I went with the Fruity Parametric Equalizer 2! I'm sure you've noticed that the EQ between each track looks slightly different than the others. Anyway, you know the drill, lower certain frequencies, boost the others!

Next, the man, the myth, the legend, the compressor! Same thing, singing is very dynamic when it comes to range, I think that's very much apparent if you take a listen to the vocals of Ere, mine or the original's. So compression is essential to make the vocals sound more consistent! Softer singing were brought up so that they didn't disappear underneath the music, and the louder sections were reigned in so that it didn't overwhelm the instruments!

However, I would like to point out a major detail in the song. In the case of Ere, the song gradually increases its intensity over the course of the song where it finally arrives at a massive crescendo near the end, and then slowly simmers back into soft, melancholy. So in this case, the compressor was used more sparingly than usual, we kind of want to avoid the same issue with the loudness war mentioned in the MMS 172 module, right? Everything doesn't need to be normalized into a set range, rather, dynamic vocal ranges can be used intentionally in the pursuit of artistic expression!

And then the final effect, just a slight touch of reverb! This is another thing we have to be quite cautious in applying. My sisters made a valid point when it comes to adding too much reverb to vocals, let me show you:

So let me reiterate, reverb can be used to great effect, but we have to be quite careful because too much, and we risk sounding like we're just singing at some random karaoke bar. But too little, and it might give off too much of a raw, unprocessed feeling, and it ends up being quite noticeable too!

So here's the edited vocal track including all the mentioned effects!

And there we have it, all the edits have now been tackled individually! Now, let me show you how it sounds when you combine it all together into our final track! 

Side note: I didn't find mastering to be a necessary step to take for this output, so I didn't bother with it.

I think I've just been listening to my voice for a week or so straight singing this damn song, that I've just gotten sick of my own voice at this point! I'm not sure how good or bad it actually sounds, but my family and girlfriend seem to think it sounds pretty good. I just hope you enjoyed my output as much as I enjoyed making it!

Looking back, I'm surprised I managed to survive this project with my sanity intact, I think. Jesus, between fighting the drums, pushing through with my vocals when I've just about lost my voice constantly recording for hours on end, and trying not to let the instruments tear each other to pieces... I feel really exhausted, but also very much relieved! I made it through!

And I guess when you think about it, that's what makes it all worth it. I experienced so many different things not just through learning by listening and watching, but also by doing! Back in the mid-term blog, I was whining about how I wish there were more activities, but well, shut up old me. This project, by itself, has allowed me an opportunity to learn more deeply about music production at my own pace! 

Unlike the prior me, who before this class, thought that just slapping parametric equalizers down onto tracks with the preset "vocal enhancer" was good enough to count for audio production... now I know that there's actually so much more to it! Mixing is about finding the right balance, but also about having enough patience to figure out how to make every part of the track play nice together instead of stepping all over each other. I mean, sure, it was absolutely tiring and sometimes makes me even regret choosing to do this project, but hearing the final product as well as how much my family and girlfriend enjoyed listening to my crummy work makes it worth every second!

And yeah, even if I got sick of my own voice, and the drums made me almost tear my hair out, in the end, I came up with something I can still, even just a teeny tiny bit, be proud of. And I think that's all that really matters.