Weekly Update #25 - What If Final Stages

Hey Everyone!

"What If" is finally close to complete and I spent most of this week chipping away and making small adjustments.

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Since the last update on "What If" I spoke with Alex about final adjustments. I combined both of our notes and set out about 4 weeks ago to finish the song.

Unfortunately, every time I opened the project or listened to the song something felt "off" about it and I couldn't pinpoint why. So I had a lot of sessions over the last 4 weeks that were spent trying to figure out exactly why and coming away with nothing of value. It was frustrating to say the least.

Until this week, that is. While there were a lot of small adjustments to be made the main issue was the drop kick drum. It was tuned to G because the first bass note of the drop is G. This usually works because the key of your song tends to be the first bass note of your chord progression; however, the key of this song is Eb so it really threw the whole feel of the song off. So I set out to replace the kick but after a few sessions of swapping kick samples in my go to sample packs I realized there was another problem.

Usually EDM songs tend to sit between the keys of F and A because that's what translates well to club speakers on the low (though there are exceptions). Eb tuned kick samples that I was trying all felt wrong so I decided to make my own kick. And while I'm pretty happy with the results I think before final I'll dial back the sub and up the mids in the kick to give it more impact and less subby-ness.

So with the main issue solved, I got to work on the rest of the tasks. Here's some screenshots of my to-do list:

Here are the most notable changes:

• EQ, Compression, and Saturation adjustments on the vocal to make it shine and sit better in the mix.
• Re-building some of the percussion to make it feel less dated.
• Overall Mixing adjustments.
• Some small arrangement changes to help with the pacing.
• Changed the outro for a better ending.

There's still a few things left to do but we're almost there! The project clocks in at over 200 tracks:

I'm waiting for Alex to get back to me with any notes before I finalize this project but I'm very happy with how this is sounding. We should be done with What If in the next week or 2!

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I know that September was light on updates but my main goal was finishing up the works-in-progress that you've already heard. Over the weekend, I'll be posting the wip downloads from September as well as the monthly poll (which will be a bit different this time).

As always, thank you for your support & have a great weekend!

- Andrew