Christmas at Highlands Production with Andrew Sharp and Tyler Wester

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Join us in this exciting episode as Andrew Sharp and Tyler Wester dive into the world of music production, focusing on the use of AI and Ableton Live. They discuss the innovative ways they're incorporating AI into their church's music production, the nuances of different pads and vocal encoding, and the detailed process behind recreating and reimagining a Christmas song. This episode is packed with insights, techniques, and a sneak peek into their pre-production workflow. Don't miss out on learning how they plan to take their music production to the next level. Enjoy and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Tyler Wester

Andrew Sharp

Transcript

0:00

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Guys, welcome back to the podcast, hanging out with Andrew Sharp and Tyler Wester, and so excited to have them back as promised. Today is all about production. Let's go. So yeah, I'm gonna get out of the way. I'm actually gonna sit right behind y'all and just kind of be a little. Fly on the wall. Um, but I can't wait to, uh, even hear this and edit this later and watch it 10 more times after we get done today. But hope y'all enjoy this episode. If you do, let us know in the comments. If there's something that, um, in either of these guys said or did in Ableton that you didn't understand, um, let us know. Okay. I do have to ask one question though. Yeah. Um. And I know you're about to get into it, but on the subject of ai, you, you said last week about how you, you kind of want, your pastor said you want the church to lead the way in technology. Something along those, was that right you, that the church to be the leaders in technology? Yeah. We actually had a, a, um, staff wide survey that was sent out that was asking how we are using AI in our job and like, can you share a little bit about this? Yeah, well I wasn't, so, I dunno, I don't know the results. Do you? Okay. I don't, I don't know the results either, but it was like, how are we using it? How do we think our department or team could be, uh, using AI better or more Yeah. Okay. It was chat GT's a great research tool for sure. Yeah, for sure. I actually. What was the question exactly? Oh, like are you guys using ai? Like how are you guys using AI in the church? Because I figured, yeah, so I've got some use cases. Yeah, like we're using Otter ai. It's really great for meetings. Yes, because it records the whole meeting. Oh, that's great. And so then you have a recording in the meeting, but it also transcribes it and gives you bullet points and directives. That's great. Based on. What it thought. Now, sometimes you have to go back in and change those, but Absolutely. If once you tell it a speaker's name too, it remembers that person. So it'll say, Tyler said blank. That's good. Which is super awesome. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I, I, I used a little bit of it in, in some productions, um, one, so a little while ago we were doing, uh, like an opener. Piece and we needed a choir sound. Yeah. And so I recorded myself, you know, I did the, the, the Instagram thing, right? I recorded myself a bunch of different ways instead of doing the thing, whatever, I just, you know, did a bunch of different distances from the mic and ran it through an AI voice changer. You know, a billion times made the choir thing. And then on a, a more recent level, I just started kind of working with Suno, which if you don't know, is an AI. Music generation software, uh, kind of the best thing it can do right now is you can put in a, like a, like a iPhone song demo. Like you write a song and then you can say, make me a version of this that sounds professional, polished, et cetera, et cetera, and the style of this artist. And it can shoot you out like a, a pretty interesting demo that still sounds weird, but like, can generate inspiration. Um, but it spits out like four of 'em. Yeah, you get it, it and then 'cause it'll give you options. Incredible. Yeah. It will give you options. So yeah, we're about to dive in. I do have a little snippet of some, some AI content that I use for this production. Just a little bit. So good. Um, but yeah. And you'll mention it again and explain a little bit more. By the way, there's a free version, there's a paid version, I think's like 10 bucks a month, and then there's another tier that's like 30 bucks a month. So yeah, you can do some things for free and then some things for paid. So we've been using it some in the pre-pro for Christmas. Okay. Just even, um, of, of like for pitching a song. Okay. So if you're trying to get a song for approval for the service. Right, right. We've used it for vocals. Okay. Okay. So if we couldn't get somebody to come sing it or we didn't, like, that's what they did. That's, it's so, like vocals are so humanizing, like they're so raw. Yeah. But I mean, if you just need a quick performance of the song just to get. The idea down just to, and you don't want this person's voice to take away from the idea or, you know, uh, there is, there is, we talk about it in these meetings about like, uh, there's a fatigue of hearing the same voice on every song. Mm-hmm. So, okay. People will. Associate the idea or the song idea when we're coming up with these ideas with the same voice that they're hearing. So if we have a set list full of songs that we're presenting mm-hmm. And they're in the early stages and it's all the same person by the third song, they're tired of it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so there is a, you know, changing out the vocal if you don't have people. Right there with you that can record something quick. It it works in a pinch. That's good. And, and it's pretty convincing. So amazing. Yeah. It was killing me though because I was trying to do a holy night and it kept telling me it was copyright. Oh, public domain. Yeah, it's public domain. So it actually, I don't know. Talk about it, Mr. Talk. I don't know how it, I don't know how it figures it out. It listens through the, the words and the lyrics so quickly 'cause we uploaded the file and I mean. Seconds later, it's telling us it's copyrighted lyrics. Oh, interesting. Yeah. As far as music, it's is, it is amazing how far it has come with music. Um, I still don't think it's completely there, but music is so subjective. It's so artistic and it's, um, but it is scary. Yeah. I have a tough time with the music side. Yeah. Yeah. I like it in some regards. But the idea of making a whole track, only ai, AI written, no, I just can't vibe with it. No, no. Totally not. It hurts my soul. Yes, a hundred percent. But I think there's gonna be a day when we, we really can't tell the difference. I of what That Velvet Teen Sunset thing. The thing that caused. Velvet Sun. Velvet sun. Sun rise. Is that what it is? Velvet Sunset Or Velvet Sunrise yeah. I don't know. I'm like, I think I'm mixing Vett, teen Rabbit and whatever. But what happened? Whatever it is. It's on Spotify, right? Is it an artist, like an AI artist? It's a fully AI artist. And they made like ai. Yeah, like personalities, they, yeah, they got, like, they reached a large number. It was in the hundreds of thousands, I think it was like three to five of monthly listeners on Spotify. So it was a, it was a bit of an outrage. Right. Honestly, the story kind of fizzled out. I don't really know what happened. Okay. Yeah. I think, oh, I think they ended up going and changing the biography to clearly say that it, this is ai, you know, all that stuff. Okay. Okay. But at first. It had reached like an insane amount of monthly listeners and the whole bio, it was pretty good, and the pictures and everything was like made. To make you think that it it was real. Oh man. And you know, people were saying, oh, Spotify's pushing this air artist, they're, they're supporting this so they can keep the profits and not pay out. They deceived them. Yeah. Well, I don't know. People were saying that Spotify was behind it. Oh, which conspiracy theorists. Here we go. Interesting. Who know Candace Owens on that. Copyright laws. Copyright laws. Yeah. On all AI content. 'cause I'm pretty sure. You don't own the copyright unless you contributed to it and contributing just a prompt. So I think it's gonna get weird. Interesting. And there's gonna probably have to be like new laws. There will be totally, there'll be legislation around it, just like crypto or anything else new. Let's just, I I'm gonna, I'm gonna continue to talk about Yeah. If I don't, if I don't stop talking Mr. Talker. So hope you, you guys enjoy this episode and we'll see you on the other side. Alright, let's jump into it. So, um, for this production. It's for one of our Christmas services here at our church. And for the services we have some more Carol like sing-along type songs. And this one is gonna be more of a production. So, uh, it, there will be string players on the stage. There will be four vocalists that are singing these very distinct parts, uh, that you'll hear, uh, huge drums. So it's less of. Like a regular Sunday morning song arrangement, uh, and more of kind of like a cinematic, take it all in type of piece. So kind of the, the spot that we're in with it, um, about 50% through production, kind of in the, the pre-production zone. This is a song that has already been recorded. And released in a previous form several years ago, and I'm kind of going back in and just revamping it for this year. So Tyler actually was a part of producing the original version of it. So what I have in my session now is I started off with the original tracks, everything from the songs, so the vocals, the drums, um. Everything. Lots of synths. It was like a, a very synth heavy song. No guitars or anything like that. And then I'm just going through section by section and kind of reimagining it a little bit. So we actually have a date to rerecord all the drums. Uh, coming up here in a little bit. So most of the drums that you'll hear in my session right now are still the original ones. So I'm kind of trying to reimagine the production and then we will base recording strings and recording drums. And obviously the vocals will be live at the services. All that will be based off of kind of this new idea for it. So what I'll do is just start off at the beginning of the song. Uh, if you are interested in hearing the original version, kind of what it sounded like before this re-imagining, it's called Oh, come. Oh, come. Emmanuel by Highlands Worship. So I'll just play it from the top. Oh, come. Yeah, so right off the bat, um, it starts with those big vocals. So those are all the original recorded vocals from the song, and I'll show you what else is going on. So we have some drone pads. These two that I'll play for you are from the original. Do you remember what that was? I am fairly certain that that's a piano. It's a piano with the shimmer verb on it, uh, with like an arpeggiator hitting the, uh. Five one and five octave and just going really fast. That's awesome. With shimmer, ver pretty certain. Got some string stuff going on. Okay, so I'll show you what I've added here. This is pretty cool. This is another pad just to add some rhythm to it. So the original version had, um, some collapse in like a high hat track. That was going through this first version of this song. I wanted to kind, kind of, uh, keep the rhythmic feel, but without actually introducing any drums yet. So what you can do here in Ableton, I'm working in Ableton Live, by the way, which is my doll, which stands for Digital Audio Workstation. It's basically anything, uh, is a software you would use to record and edit, uh, and, and play back music. And in Ableton there's this cool warp feature. Basically what that does is if you have a track that is, um, it does a lot, but what you can commonly use it for is taking a track that's at a different tempo and warping it to the tempo, um, maybe faster or slower that you're working in. There's some cool quirks that you can kind of exploit to make some sound design choices. So, for instance, this sound. Un warped. Sounds like this. Just a sample I got off of Splice and I made it to sound like this. So the most obvious change is it has this kind of rhythmic pulse to it. Um, if you warp an audio clip in Ableton Live and select the Beats algorithm and adjust this here. And I'll take off the reverbs so you can hear it more dramatically. You can really chop it up. You can kind of make like a sequencer or an ator out of anything. You can change the subdivision eighth notes, quarter put on 16th. I do this all the time, um, all the time to kind of make a rhythmic sound out of something that's not. Like a sequencer, an arp. So that's, that's a pretty cool sound. Um, I gotta, I gotta stop you there too. Um, I'm jumping in here. I'm in the background just watching. But, uh, we did have a question on Instagram that I'll go and throw in right now. Oh yeah. As you get going, you did talk about a shimmer pad, Tyler. Um, do y'all know this user, Isaac? Isaac? Isaac. Isaac. I know Isaac. Isaac. Underscore js. Yes. Okay. He was also gonna asking mellow mid-range pad or the bright shimmer pad. I guess we, you could talk about those two when you would need it, uh, when you would use it and why. And what are your go-tos with those? I mean, on this one I would say the bright shimmer pad because it's trying to be a, a special thing. If we're talking about underneath a pastor, I think it'd be more of the mellow mid-range pad. 'cause I think the high-end information would get a little distracting. Andrew thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. I, and I'm thinking about synths, um, and I'm thinking about dynamics. And I can talk about this more in the key segment too, but when I'm thinking about dynamics, I'm thinking about three things. I'm thinking about the tone of it, which would be like bright versus dark. So when you're talking about a mellow pad, you're taking out the high frequencies and kind of leaving the low frequencies. If you're thinking about a. A bright pad or a shimmer pad, you're leaving in a lot of the high frequencies. So if, if I want to raise my dynamic or add more energy, I'm gonna introduce more high frequencies. I'm gonna probably play louder. So, uh, tone and volume. Uh, and then also I might play more notes if I wanna increase my dynamic so louder, brighter, more, and then you play softer, darker. Less if you wanna bring down the dynamics. Um, so more is more, more, yeah. If you do all of 'em and less is less, you're, you're going in. Got it. But um, that's not a rule, you know, obviously. So we're using the shimmer pad here at the beginning of the song. It sounds soft. You use your own taste. That's not like something you have to stick to. Um, a lot of times when you hear the term shimmer, we're also talking about. Um, a type of reverb that actually generates an octave above what you played, which I'm assuming is, might have been included on the sound you made. I'm relatively certain that that was probably, if I had to, I, this was 2016, so it's been a minute, but, um, I, if I had to guess it would've been Valhalla vintage verb running into Valhalla shimmer verb that would create that kind of, uh, texture and a lot of it. I'll just show you how you can do that with this stock Ableton Reverb. So I've got this hybrid verb here, and you can select the shimmer algorithm and I'll put the blend all the way to the shimmer side. It's on 12 semitone, so that's gonna be 12. Uh, sibi tones are half nodes up from the original source, and, uh, you can hear what it sounds like. On this sound. So here's the, the pad without it just another pad that I made. Here's with the shimmer verb. That's all a verb. You can hear it creating that higher octave. So a lot of times that's too much for. Hm. Most situations sometimes. It's really awesome. So you don't wanna go crazy with that. Couple more sounds in this section. Um, these are both from the Hammers and Waves Acoustic library, I think is what it's called. It's a UX upright piano, and it's got all these cool presets that are like very, um, very affected. Uh, lots of reverb and warping going on. Here's another one. I think I have another synth playing the same line. So this is kind of like a, a motif. Um, it's a, it's a melody line that I, I want to come back to and kind of establish as the driving pulse of the first few sections of the song. What scent is that? That is Scarborough from the company. Tele Tone. It's a software, nice instrument that you can load. Into any doll. And then I've got some more layers. These are actually, um, from the OB six, which is a hardware synthesizer. And, uh, I just played these in live. Uh, didn't do any, any mid tricks or anything, just played 'em in live. I like to keep a little bit of that realness. You hear the same line? So let's into this one still the OB six, I call it OBG here, obviously wrong, OB six. And then the original version of this song, there were strings that were very active, uh, for the beginning, rethinking it. I wanted to step more into the kind of Han Zimmer esque. Um, slow strings and synthesizers zone. So I chose a string library called Heirloom by Spitfire Audio to play some just chords on the strings here. This is what that sounds like. I believe This is the, yes, the, the Tondo dynamic, very soft. It's just a, a playing style for the strings. It's gorgeous, very intimate. And then, so we're kind of entering into the strings zone. Let's see what else is going on. Continuing in the kind of Han Zimmer space. Um, this is kind of like a, like a Pirates of the Caribbean type of string vibe. Another way that I'm trying to add energy and rhythm. Without drums. So that's droning Now that we've kind of isolated some different parts, um, I'll play through so you can just kind of hear what's going on. Maybe pick out some of those parts in context. Awesome. So real quick. This was my first attempt at using suno, the AI program for anything, for anything at all. So when I was coming up with ideas for this version of the song, I just, I threw the original in there and I said, um, reimagine this. If it was the score for a Han Zimmer movie. And then I listed a few Hanzi movies and said strings and ambient synths and all this stuff. Um, a lot of 'em were, were really sketchy, but there were a few. Um, recordings that it gave me where I was able to split out the stems and kind of extract some ideas. And for now, while I'm doing pre-production, I'm coming up with a lot of parts that. Are going to be elaborated on and also recorded by other musicians. So like, I'm coming up with string parts, but we'll have strings recorded and we'll have an arranger actually write the parts. I'm coming up with drum parts, but we're gonna have a drummer come, you know, and record live drums on it. So I kept this little suno, uh, clip of the strings in here because specifically the part that it added, I really loved. So I heard that core change. This is what it sounds like in context. After I listened to that and kind of added my own layers, thought that was really cool. It also heard that melody line that I had written on the synths and copied it. And just placed it in a really cool spot. So I took inspiration from that and put it on these low strings. I, again, they don't sound perfect, but they're gonna get rerecorded, and that's the extent that I've used Suno in my. Music so far, but we'll see. Uh, quick question. How do you spell that and how do you actually, um, I know we won't show it here, but how do you go about using that? Is that a plugin? Is that something in a web browser? How do you, how do you go about that? Yeah, so Suno is like, it's an AI tool. It's spelled SUNO. You can Google it and I'm sure you'll find it. It's just a web browser program that. It, it works off of AI and it can generate like full tracks of music, like an entire song. And then you can, you can split out, um, basically categories from that if you want to. If you like it, you can say, split me out the drums, the vocal, the senses, and the strings. And it can also do, uh, remixes of your own music. Um. It's not gonna be like release ready, but if you tweak it, you can get something kind of good. So the way I was using it was, uh, inputting the song we already had and saying, Hey, come up with some ideas on this. Um, not to bypass the creative process, obviously, um, but just to see like what crazy thing could it think of that, that I wouldn't think of? Um, and I think it, it, um, added a little bit to the beginning of the song, which is cool. So as the song develops past the first verse, we have this breakdown, just a little break another, and now the drums are in. So just a quick nod to the drums. These were all recorded. They're the, the part up on the top in red. These are from the original version. They're awesome. There's some rot tos, which is those were actually from the live performance. These are live rot tos. Live rot tos. You can hear Nicole in the background of the mic. You can. Very cool. So those, I want to say they could have been some samples, but we actually have a, uh, like here on site, we have a chapel where people do, uh, like weddings and memorials, and the foyer area is all tile. And the ceilings pro like, uh, probably goes like 20 feet high. So what we did is we set up a tom in there and had one close mic, and then a room mic. And then we doubled it. And so it has like six, seven seconds of hang time. That's so good. And we recorded that on, on this in 2019. Maybe. Did you just say six, seven? Let's hear it again. Yeah, that's the chapel. So good. You can't be in a real room. Drum kit. So stuff's starting to come in. Can I, can I say something in the drum kit please? So, um, uh, we still don't have any like real proper studio and uh, that was recorded in a bathroom across the church. Um, yeah, that was Josiah. He's one of our, uh, worship directors at one of the campuses. And, uh, we set up a drum kit in a bathroom, put up some baffling, and that's what that is. You do what you can. Um, so with the drums that are in there, I am supplementing with some effects to match the dynamic that we're creating here. That maybe where the effects didn't match what, where they were made for the old arrangement, they didn't necessarily match. What I mean by effects mostly is like this type of sound. Is that from spice? That's from a company called Ke Forest. I think it's K-E-E-P-F. And the rest of it's like the word forest, and it's a, um, a plugin called Devastator. Nice. It's used for like trailers, like movie trailers type of sounds. And then I have another sub drop in here. You gotta be careful with these that you don't have a lot of, um, synth bass or bass guitar going at the same time or really be particular about how you mix it. Because they can, um, they can clash pretty easily. And then also on the effect side, I wanted to show one more thing. So I like to make risers, um, by riser, I mean. A, a sound that kind of swells into the next SEC section. It kind of gets you from, from here to there. I like to make him out of pads that are reversed and altered in some way. So I have this one here and in context kind of leads into that sub drop, and I'll show you how you can make your own without always going to sly. So if I take this, I talked about warping earlier in Ableton. So this one, this track is actually warped and it's transposed up a whole octave. So I'll kind of start to deconstruct what I did with this. So first we'll put it back to the regular octave. That's just what that sounds like, and let's just stretch it out so we can get more of the context of what's going on. And then I'll actually reverse it. And what I'm really doing is reversing it back to how it was originally. You might recognize that because that's the same synth teeth from the beginning of the song. So all I did was took this, this track here, I think is the one, and reversed it and then transposed it up 12 Semitones faded it in. And you get this and you can discover a lot of really cool stuff that way. Um, that's one of my favorite ways to create sounds without using Splice or another library, which I do use a lot. Okay, so moving into the arrangement. So what's going on in that little break is a lot of amazing vocal stacks. I feel like you might wanna talk about this vocoder. Oh yeah. Yeah. So, um, we took the demo vocal, this is from 2016, and, um, we took the demo vocal and. Honestly, in 2016 there were a whole lot less vocoder plugins and um, it was really hard to get that voco or sound that you heard on records. And back then there was really just a lot less information out there. And, um, it was pretty cool. There is a setting in contact where you can drop the. File in there and play it as a sample. So you're using contact as a sampler and you can just drop one sample in there. But there's a vote cutter setting and it's really hard to use and touchy, but it sounded incredible and I tried to recreate something in 2019 when we redid this for a studio project and I couldn't make it better. So we just went back to the original one, and I think we might have. Warped it and stretched it to just fit the new vocals, but it still worked. And uh, yeah, that's that vote cutter. It's so cool. Let's listen to it. Soloed out. What a oak loader does basically is take anything but. A lot of times it's a, it's a voice, it's a vocal performance, and then you can play in on a keyboard or using just drawing midi notes, what notes you want it to stretch that vocal to, so you can turn one vocal into this kind of cordal thing. And it's, uh, it's awesome. Also going on on that section, more OB six synth layers. And I also used the OB six for a base track. This is another one. Just recorded it in, not using any midi, just trying it over and over again until it feels right. So there's a lot of returning things. In the second verse, we've got this sample we talked about. We've got this lead line. We've got the, the Pirates of the Caribbean strings. We also have some incredible synth based work. From the, the previous version that I would just like to highlight because this stuff is crazy. The eight oh eights are from the new one. This is, here's just the old one coming up again. What's go? What's going on? Okay, so there's a couple different synth base. I wanna say that a guy who used to work here, his name's Adam, I wanna say he did this one, which would've been I think on a Profit X, which is a, um, it's a keyboard that has analog filters, but it's digital samples. They actually. I don't know if it's eight DO eight. That's how you, it's eight DIO. Yeah. I dunno if that's how you pronounce it. Uh, it obviously seems like they're playing on audio, but, um, I think he played that in, on that Prophet X. And then the other synth based track was the, uh, baringer MS oh one, MS one. It's like the recreation of the Roland and that one. I can't remember if it allowed you to send MIDI to it or not. That might have also been played in. Maybe it allowed you to send MIDI, but it just can't save presets. Yes, it can't save presets, so we had to just like get it. That's, and if anybody touched it, we were really messed up. It's red. It's red, and it was, it's like a $200 keyboard. It's really, really great. Yeah, that one, that one sounds great. What else is going on in here? Cent base. This is the Beringer. Yeah, this is the Beringer, and we might have put a chorus on it. There's definitely something that's doing a stereo effect. I can't remember. I. How we did that. The, uh, bouncing synth right there is either Omnisphere or the prophet oh eight and then like a pan man that's making it alternate left and right, right there. That's a great trick. So I can, I can share that. So a great way to get your sense to have their own space in the mix, especially when you have a lot of stuff going on like synthesizers, you got strings, you got vocals, stuff that's staying static, um, in the mix as far as a, like a left right stereo field, uh, sense is you can put some auto panning on it and there's a couple ways to do this. Really simple way to do it. Is Ableton has this auto pan plugin, and what it's gonna do is it's just gonna move it around left to right at whatever rate uh, you want it to. And this one lets you sync it to a specific beat on the grid. I kind of like to just, just. Wing it and kind of adjust it. Um, here's what it, I'm gonna take this pad. I'm gonna max out the auto pan and let you hear that. You'll be able to tell better if you're wearing headphones or have some sort of speaker system. That's a very dramatic use case. You can take down the amount. So now it's kind of moving around and, and what this does is there's, you know, there's gonna be crowded spaces in the mix, but it's, since it's moving, it's kind of gonna find gaps in the mix and just peek out a little bit so you don't have to push it and, and fill up too much space. Just trying to hear this pad. So that's a great technique as well, especially on pads. There's a lot of plugins that do that, um, as well, that aren't standard to Ableton if you use Logic or Pro Tools. So after the song develops for a while, there is a pretty substantial drum break. And just to give you some context, when we first did this song, there were giant. Stars made of drums that came down from the ceiling and people would play them during this whole drum break section. So that's kind of the visual explainer for what's going on this year. I think we've got some rolling drum sculptures or something that people will play. Um, and then it's gonna lead into, it's, it's kind of the, um, it's the bridge to a key change. So we're going to another key and we're using this drum break to do it. We'll rerecord all these drums, but I'll just play it for you so you can kind of hear. Got more of these movie trailer sounds coming up. Hold on, we gotta stop. I don't know if Andrew knows this, but I'm pretty sure he's gonna be one of the drummers. Yeah's gonna be great. So, you know, I'm already stretching. Um, we can't, we can't ignore this in base. Another one, another golden oldie. I love that. And then, okay, so going into this next section, I wanted it to kinda shift from the dark Moody Han Zimmer vibe. You know, we're changing keys. Uh, I wanted it to feel more like, kind of like a, like a celebration. Like this celebratory, the lyrics is, is Rejoice Emmanuel has come, you know, so we're moving out of that. Uh, that dark vibe into a more joyful vibe. Part of that was bringing in some new percussion loops just to kind of set the rhythmic foundation. Um, so I introduced the percussion loop, one of them in. The long extended drum break section sounds like this. I give you the click. So it's like straight a DM, yeah. Dm. Yeah. And then here's ano, here's that loop ended. Another one that's about to come in in, in the next section. So. You can listen for that as we move out of the drum section into this sort of rejoice section. So there's a lot in there. I'll play the original drum track and I'll explain why I decided to mute it here. So different rhythmic foundation. Since we're rerecording this, I thought this is a great opportunity to kind of change the vibe, put another type of, uh, line over it. So. When we rerecord the drums, that'll feel nice and full and big. For now, it's mostly these loops, but again, a lot of this is just indicators for the people who will go on to record the final parts. And then also in here, this is like a, like a gospel type kind of looping piano line. Something that I kinda like to play live a lot. If, um. If the drummer's gonna go to the symbols, um, you know what I mean? And I kind of decided to make that kind of the main thing here. So we've got the piano, we've got a low octave piano. It's always good to separate these so you can mix them differently. Like I'm absolutely slamming this low octave with the compressor, I believe. Well, I would be, if I had activated my license. It was easier imagination on that one. And then I can keep this one a little more natural and isolated, a higher octave just to help it cut. Did you play that or program that? I played it and I quantized it Nice. And then we've got the strings doing the same thing. Same. Short strings from before. Yeah, I like that five you added to the base. Yeah, that lit like a little one over five to a five. Mm-hmm. It's nice. And then just earlier today I was feeling like this is a little empty even for the state it's at. So I just added this pad from atmosphere. Which to get kind of into the nitty gritty of it, this was one of my first jumps into Omnisphere three, making my own patch. And, um, I decided to go in here and use some samples from vintage synths. So I used a Juno string sample, and then I layered it with, um, with the synth oscillator also on a Juno. Oscillator and then to really make it wide. Omnisphere three really makes it easy. So you can just go here to the main panel, add some unison, so without, let's play it here. I'll add the unison. Widens up a lot, a little bit of reverb from the ambient section. Love it. Synthase from Trillian, which in similar form as the Omnisphere patch is a minimoog sample or oscillator, I'm really not sure, in trill. And then a, a Juno oscillator layered together sounds like this. This would also be, oh, this one's working. Slammed, absolutely slammed with compression. You can't really tell. So all that comes together for this kind of celebratory section. And then there's a short break. Oh. Coming back to E Minor. Back to E minor, uh, in 2016. That was one of the hardest sections we had. Literally, we were stuck probably on that transition 'cause we came up with this whole flow in E minor and then we came up with this whole bridge in the key of D. And then we didn't know how to get back and um, we had uh, someone who's a friend come in and do a vocal session with us and he came up with that line that the vocal sang right there that got us back. Wow. Which is very helpful weeks. That's so cool. Came together in an hour. Come, come. So cool. So this last section is the most not finished and not what it will be, um, be for me, working with this drum stem, it was taking up a lot of. Space and I tried really hard to make it take up less space so that I could work a little bit more. Here's what it sounded like. There's just symbols taking up so much, which was perfect for the original arrangement. Uh, and I tried to kind of use a clipper and a compressor and a DS search. I take some of that out even. The drum bus in Ableton has this, uh, transient function where you can kind of like pull back the symbols a little bit. But it just sounds kind of bad. So in order to give myself more room to work, I muted that and replaced it with some simple drum samples here. Basically doing the same thing. We've got more effects that are just leading into different sections. This one is called Hum. That's what I named it. You see, and then classic symbol and Tom, that sound, that's the one. And then another situation where I'm putting something in here to indicate what I want to be played. So this is gonna sound maybe a little bit. Not right or unfinished on the drums. So it's just this little break. Where everything goes away and the bass kind of follows the melody line and you got the drums doing this. That's not the vibe we're going for, but I know the drummer who'll be playing Mark will know what I mean by that. Mm-hmm. You know, he plays this specific thing that I was just kind of trying to quickly recreate. Um, so that's, that'll happen a lot on the pre-pro side of just like. You know, they're gonna know what you mean. Uh, some more pads, the original strings. So I was talking about how the original strings were, uh, very grand, very busy. I, I left them in this last section, uh, 'cause they kind of fit better. But again, our string arranger will redo all of this. This is, you can imagine this more throughout the rest of the song. It's, it's amazing. It's so good. Um, so good. And I believe that. Is it, is there anything else you wanted to touch on? No, that was great. All right. There it is. I'm so interested to hear what the final product is. Yeah, it, it, so, you know, you have to know. It could be completely different. You know, we we're working with maybe not completely different, but, but very different. We're working with different arrangers. We're working out with a whole service of songs that need to go together. Mm-hmm. Uh, different people working on pre-pro. For different songs, so changes might be made, but that's about, I would say. Yeah, 40 to 60%. Uh, I hope y'all enjoyed hanging out, seeing the Ableton session, hearing the arrangement. Um, a little bit of AI tip in there, just a little bit of a part of it. Um, but thank you, Andrew, for taking us through that. And Tyler, as his sidekick who originally you kind of forged away with that production. Is that right or no? Yeah, so everything. I just wanna make sure this is known, that like there's so many people involved in all of this stuff and the Christmas humble stuff. Humble guy, Mr. Talker. That's true. No, no, it's true. It's true. And um, one of the main guys, he used to be our, our boss and that song started in 2016 with us locked in a room every day for weeks. I'm telling you, it was the breakout. There was like some, something great about it and there was something just, it was a grind. Wow. Man, man. And to get that one out. And so like, I'm, I'm proud of, of how it did in the service and then it was, it was almost just like. Just felt good to get it on a release, you know? Yeah, right. He said, oh, okay. He can live on, and then to do it again. It, it is just incredible. But if you only knew how many people are behind the scenes working on this. So true. It's, it's insane. Oh, I bet, I bet. Um. And a a little business idea, a little adaptation to the escape rooms. Like what if instead of the escape rooms, like trying to find you, you have to sit in