Production Hack: Adding Simple Synths to Your Arrangement
Have you ever listened to a song and immediately been able to tell what instrument the song was written on? Maybe you’ve never thought about it, but my ear always tends to get drawn to acoustic strumming when it’s a singer-songwriter that likely composed the entire thing with just their voice and an acoustic guitar.
The same goes for a track that features a hip-hop style beat; I can hear how the entire thing was built up around an MPC or some other style of drum pad.
Stylistically, these things aren’t bad. It helps tie your music to a genre using instrumentation and arrangement techniques that are instantly recognizable to the listener. You’re able to create a sense of familiarity with something that’s brand new to them, which in turn gets them to “buy in” to your song much faster than they otherwise would.
Using this same “buy in” approach, what would you say if I told you there was a way that all modern music can be tied together? Using simple synth and keyboard overdubs, many artists and producers can tie their music in, not just to their main genre, but the global music scene as a whole. Here’s how…
Using Sampled Instruments
One of the biggest trends right now in music production is finding sampled instruments that fall outside of your traditional genre. Producers are finding success by incorporating things like steel drums, harps, flutes & more into Top 40 tracks. This globalization of music has created an opportunity to share culture within music and break down boundaries that stood before.
Especially with the prevalence of streaming platforms like Spotify, your music can be heard nearly anywhere in the world. It only makes sense to add production sounds that give your song that type of worldwide appeal, and it makes you sound more flexible as a producer. If a listener from the other side of the planet can listen to your song and hear something traditional and familiar - you’re much more likely to win that listener over.
With the availability of unique samples of world instruments available online, and plenty of samplers to load them into your session with, there’s no reason you can’t start adding new sounds to your productions today.
Creating Textures
Using synths to create textured pads within a song is another way that modern mixers are both filling space in their mix and creating a more consistent listening experience. Pads can set the foundation for the rest of your song without ever becoming overbearing. Soft, airy pads will create additional ambience, while darker pads with more going on can create an edgy and intense scene.
These textures can get buried behind other instrumentation at times, but that’s completely fine. You’re really just using them to set the stage and generate constant movement within your song.
These textures work extremely well at providing listeners with a sense of familiarity too. With the majority of obvious textured synth work coming from film and television, pads can act to help a listener recall a specific environment from a film and immediately associate it with your song subconsciously.
This type of production trick can work to help make a lasting association in your listener’s mind long after the song has ended.
Following The Leader
One of the coolest ways that producers are using keyboard and synth overdubs in the studio today is to create reinforcement with their vocals. Especially in pop music, vocoders and other vocal-sounding synths have been used to create depth and dynamics with the human voice. The same concept can be applied to guitar, bass, or really any other instrument that you’d like to thicken up in your mix.
The process is actually pretty simple here too – especially for producers that don’t write music very fluently. There’s no knowledge of music theory needed, just the ability to copy what the lead singer is doing.
Producers just need to play the basic melody out onto a MIDI track and add the synth to that track. If you don’t have access to a keyboard or the melody is too difficult, there are even tools that will let you export a vocal to MIDI with pretty good accuracy. There are even some modern synths that let you feed the vocal audio in directly using a copy of the track or a send.
Using this method, you can effectively double a voice with something new and unique with very little effort required. You’ll probably spend more time finding the synth you like best than you’ll spend getting it set up! And when you’re done, gluing the two together with some compression can make them sound like a single instrument.
Production Like The Pros Do It
If you’re looking to step up your music production game and want to truly understand how the studio can become an instrument of its own, be sure to subscribe to our blog updates for more of these tips and tricks.
For those looking to go a step further in their engineering career, make sure you come join the JST VIP group, where members get access to tons of extra video tutorials, exclusive plugins, mix critiques, member-only discounts and so much more!
