Forgot about Dre Write up

For my track I chose to recreate Forgot about Dre by Dr. Dre and Eminem. The first step that I took was to convert the track to MP3 via a YouTube converter and place it into a Logic file. I then put in the bass line; I did this by borrowing an Encore bass guitar and then opening the Forgot about Dre bass tab on the internet:

I DIed the Bass Guitar into the computer using a inch jack to jack cable which was plugged into the Line 6 MIDI keyboard. This tab was relatively easy to play and after a couple practices it was easily recorded into Logic. Alternatively, I could have recorded the Bass Guitar by plugging it into an amp and then miking up the amplifier, however this gives less clarity to the sound and can also cause the proximity effect (when the microphones is too close to the sound source and consequently picks up too much of the bass frequencies). After the bass was inputted we decided to insert some MIDI drums to act as a template for the live drummer to play along to. I did this by opening 3 new tracks on my Logic file, each of them was a Dry Standard Kit, however one track was for the Kick Drum, one was for the Snare Drum and another was for the Hi Hat. I listened to the song on YouTube while Logic was recording and I played each drum in time with the song, after some slight tweaking on the piano roll the drum beat matched perfectly in time with the Bass Guitar.

Despite there being relatively little in the way of instruments to play along to, I had a Studio 1 session the next day which I decided to use to record my live drums. The drum kit was set up in the centre of the room; it was placed there because this allows for the acoustic treatment of the live room to fully come into effect. If the drum kit had been positioned closer to a wall or corner, its possible that the microphones could pick up slight reverberation off the sides of the room. In the case of Forgot About Dre the drums are relatively tight sounding so it was beneficial to reduce the echo from the room.

Next me and my group micd up the drum kit. 1) We set up the microphone on the Bass Drum, for this we used an Audix F6 dynamic microphone because it has a hyper cardioid pickup pattern which would reduce the feedback and ambient sounds which may have come from the rest of the room or the drum kit. When we placed the Mic into the stand I positioned it fully into the sound hole of the Kick Drum, this helps the microphone pick up the full effect of the attack on the drum and reduces the resonance that comes after. I decided this was a better sound as it was truer to the original Kick Drum in the song. This was plugged into input 1 in the stage box.

2) We micd up the Snare Drum; this is the trickiest drum to record as it requires 2 microphones to get a good quality recording. One microphone is suspended above the drum and another is directly below it both pointing into the centre of the drum itself. For the top microphone we used an SM-57, this is a hugely popular microphone due to its high quality performance. It possesses a cardioid pickup pattern which made it perfect for getting the sound of the snare drum as you want to be able to hear the hit of the drum stick on the skin of the snare. This mic was suspended about 2 inches off the drum and slightly towards the edge pointed towards the centre. It was plugged into input 2 in the stage box.

The mic we used on the bottom of the Snare was an SM-58 dynamic microphone; this again is a widely used and popular microphone with a cardioid pickup pattern. We positioned this microphone directly in the middle on the underside of the drum so that it picks up the high end sound of the Snare. It was plugged into input 3 in the stage box.

3) The overhead microphones were put into position. For this we used Audix F9s. These are pre polarized condenser microphones with a cardioid pickup pattern. These mics record the drum kit as a whole but primarily focus on the cymbals. I decided to set these microphones up as a spaced pair because I feel that it accurately records a good quality of sound overall, as opposed to setting them up in an XY pattern as this has been known to pick up reverberating sound from the sides of the room. The left and right overheads were plugged into inputs 4 and 5 respectively.

4) Finally I plugged in the headphones for the drummer to wear into the stage box.

When it came to actually recording the drums, a drummer from outside of college played them for me. I sat in studio 1 and spoke to the drummer via the microphone on the talkback controller, after he listened to the original song a few times he confirmed that he could play it and then I began the recording. It required a couple of takes before we all agreed that the drums sounded correct and in time. Once the microphones were taken down I then moved onto the next stage in the song.In Forgot about Dre there is a short, repeating Guitar riff which I needed to replicate. In Studio 1 there was an Epiphone Les Paul Goldtop electric Guitar, this guitar was used to record the short riff. I DIed the guitar into the Mac tower using a Rocksmith Cable and then I added an amplifier on Logic to find a Guitar tone that fit the song.

I used the Clean Warm Jazz template for the tone and then slightly modified the EQ on the amplifier to reduce the treble; this created the perfect tonality to suit the song. Alternatively, I could have used a jack to jack cable and directly inputted the Guitar into the ISA One preamp but the Rocksmith cable was on hand.

I found the Guitar tab for the song on the internet:

I asked a music performer to play the Guitar part for me and he agreed. After a few practice runs he recorded it into Logic. On top of the riff in the original song we also decided to add a short Blues style Guitar solo which was improvised in the studio, this gave my track a slightly different feel to the original as Blues and Hip Hop are rarely mixed together and in my opinion improved it overall.The lead Guitar playing the main riff has a slightly different sound to the solo Guitar; this is because I added a fuzz-wah effect to it. Fuzz-wah creates a sound of distortion on the Guitar; I used it so that the lead Guitar would sound distinctive on top of the rest of the mix, especially the second Guitar.

After the Guitar was recorded I moved onto the strings section, this was tricky as this would have to be done via MIDI using the keyboard, I went through Logics various MIDI strings sounds and eventually decided to use the pop strings as I felt these sounded closest to the original tracks sound. I used a YouTube tutorial that explained the chord sequence for the strings section:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bWLBonga_QFrom there the strings were easily recorded in.One of the most complicated segments of this track is that there is a repeating reversed cymbal that plays frequently throughout the entire song. I didnt know how to recreate this so I looked up another YouTube tutorial that explained it effectively. In order to make this sound I created a fourth Dry Standard Kit track and named it Cymbal (Reversed) and then found the sound on that Kit, after playing it once I then bounced it in place and converted it to an audio track. From there you simply double click the audio, go to file and then select reverse and the signal is instantly reversed. I then copy and pasted the sound all the way throughout the track, it is consistently repeated except for the second Cymbal hit which I left in but muted.After all instruments in the song were recorded I moved on to mixing and mastering the sounds. The first step was to EQ the instruments which were fighting for similar frequencies. The most obvious example of this was the Bass Guitar and Bass Drum. I looked on the EQ of these two tracks and saw that the most common frequency was around 100Hz, after listening to the track a few more times I realised that the bass line played by the Bass Guitar is quite prominent in the mix, so I decided to drop the kick drum by 5.5dBs at the 100Hz mark and then compensate for the drop by raising the Bass Guitar at 100Hz.

Within Hip Hop music the Snare Drum is a very important element of the beat, generally in rapping technique the rapper aims to emphasise words which land on the beat of the Snare. Going on this knowledge I boosted the Bottom Snare and Top Snare microphones at the frequency they were loudest at, after observing the EQ I realised this was around 200Hz, so I boosted these frequencies by 8.0dB.

When the important tracks were EQed I began with the compression. I firstly sent all the live drums to a bus:This makes it much easier to compress the whole drum kit as opposed to doing each drum individually, while each drum may need slightly different compressing its advantageous as generally you will want each to drum to sound of a similar level. Compressors work by limiting the dynamic range of a track. The dynamic range refers to the difference between the loudest and quietest point on the audio signal, essentially compression evens out the volume between 2 or more instruments. In the case of the drum kit, my snare drum was slightly overpowering in comparison to the rest of the kit while the bass drum was too quiet. I decreased the gain of the bus by -3.0dB and then adjusted the compressor threshold till I found the desirable level.

I also applied compression to both of the electric guitar tracks.As the song comes to a close I used automation to make all the tracks fade out.I found this to be more effective than the fade tool because it allows you to be more precise with this numbers. In this particular case I attenuated the tracks from around the 0.0dB mark till they were silent completely and did it in the space of around 4 bars.