Ned Frankly - Studio Sketch Session with Music and Narration by Ned
Channel: Ned Frankly
Date: 04/07/2016

A 16+ minute session in the studio with Ned. The music is a sketch, and this is a typical short session meant to capture an idea. 

Voiceover / Narration by Ned.

The final mix will be made available in HD on SoundCloud when it's complete. Thanks for listening, and please comment!

Jay

Script:

Welcome to Frankly Studios. This is Ned, and I'm going to give a play by play of a 16 minute sketch for a song I'm working on.

I'm recording to Ableton, so after the session I'll do a final mix and post the tune to SoundCloud. What you're about to watch is a standard production session, which means it's repetitive, filled with mistakes, and sometimes it looks like I'm just sitting there. Lots of people ask "but what is it that you Do?" This video is one answer - Production is usually not very exciting.

I'm starting out by laying in a couple of drum patterns from the Kaossilator Pro +. I'll then setup the two patterns to alternate automatically every 4 bars.  These are stock drums on the kaossiltor, and the distortion is built in. In retrospect, I think I had the output set to 11, so part of the distortion may be the fact that I likes me some Kick. Loud.

Next comes the bass, provided by one of my favorite old synths, my microKorg. This is the stock sine wave bass patch, good old A24. It sat at a local pawn shop for months before it finally got down to $200 and I had to buy it. It's the old pre-USB model, but it's still that classic synth that you've heard on almost every album produced in the last 8 years. It's fun to find a stock patch from the microKorg used as the intro to a John Frusciante song, or prominent in a Gorillaz hit. Lots of stock patches sort of like with the DX7. Unlike the DX7, however, It is possible to program the microKorg. Nobody has ever programmed a DX7. There are tales and legends, but I don't believe a word of them. 

Now for the solo. I had a basic Minimoog patch setup on my MS-20, and I tweaked it a bit for the solo, a sine-wave glider. I was genuinely surprised at how weird the patching is for this little beast. It screams like it's being fed into a wood chipper, but then it can throw the sweetest flute you've ever heard. 

Now that the tracks are laid in, it's time for some sweetening. I'm adding compressors, side-chained compressors, adjusting the delay, and doing basic post work.