April Dreams -Dreamy & Sleepy Lofi

Some dreams last forever…

Music Production:

Purpose: Create a dreamy Lofi track.

Process:
I came into this project quite late. Daunyé was able to work his magic in creating a majority of the song. I came in as the arranger and engineer for the track following Daunyé’s vision. For arranging the track, the goal was to obtain something short, sweet, and fleeting like a dream. The track is arranged into ultimately 3 sections: Intro (A), Verse (B), Chorus (C) into a ABCBC pattern. The goal was to blend the sections like blurring the lines of a dream and reality. Daunyé’s piano seemlessly ties together the sections in a sensation of floating through a sea of effortless thoughts. Drums come to give rhythm and go to highlight the serenity of the piano’s melody.

Engineering:

Purpose: This project was planned for submission for labels. In order to submit, we were required submissions to be at 44.1K Sample Rate & -14 LUFS.

Process: A surprisingly important part of engineering this track was managing a VU meter on my mix buses. When Brauerizing, I wanted the compression to result in exactly 1 db of compression. In order to measure my accuracy, I used WAVES VU meter set to headroom of 20db. My mix session have recently been set to K20 scale. I wanted compression to add balance, pump, and ultimately maintain dynamics in my submixes. Reverb was massively important to convey a dream-like state. There 3 variations of reverb paired with a tape delay and chorus to let the mix float. The chorus is a roland Juno 60 Chorus run through Ableton’s Stock Chorus at 65% mix to give this warm, analog feel that’s both modern and vintage. For the 3 Reverbs, it’s variations of presets from Neoverb to resemble blending, big room, and small room reverbs to give a mixture of space.

Specs:

• Software:

  • Ableton Live 11.1

  • Pro Tools 12

  • API-2500 plugin

  • J37 Tape Machine Plugin

  • Izotope Neoverb

  • Logic Pro

  • Juno 60 Chorus

  • Ableton Live Chorus

• Hardware:

  • Scarlett 18i20

Credits:

Wayne Brown - Producer, arranger, Mixing Engineer, Mastering Engineer

Daunyé Synigal - Artist, Co-Producer, Writer