When Bands Meet Brands: A Deep Look With STEVESMITH

Collaboration between Musicians and Brands has been around for quiet a while. Brands aim music personalities for their audience. Millions of people are watching music videos. By collaborating with musicians, brands are able to advertise for a lifetime, as their products are shown in that music video, but there are actually variations in how they work.

Product Placement

This form of collaboration is the most common and you can frequently find product placement on your favorite music video. As the name implies, product placement is the practice when brands literally shows their product in a music video. 

Here's some examples:

1. Beats Pill (Nicki Minaj - Anaconda)

2. CÎROC Summer Colada and Luc Belaire Luxe (DJ Khaled - I'm The One ft. Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance the Rapper, Lil Wayne)

Sometimes product placement is not low-key. Take a look at number 3, it's the one that you can't unsee.

3. Samsung Galaxy Note 5 (Ariana Grande - Focus)

Advertisements Featuring Musicians

You've seen brands in music videos, you might also encounter advertisements with musicians on it. They are simply personalities that attract the audience.

Have you seen Drake on Sprite's Ad?

1. Sprite: The Spark Commercial

or Michael Jackson on Pepsi Ad?

2. Pepsi: Pepsi Generation

Branded Music

This form of Collaboration is probably the coolest one. Branded Music is a feature length thematic music for one brand, without selling out through the audio, but through the music video only. Watch these examples!

1. Avicii vs. Conrad Sewell - Taste The Feeling (For Coca Cola)

2. Zedd, Aloe Blacc - Candyman

Which one is your favorite?

Utilizing Audio Samples For Music Production

It’s 2018, you can virtually turn any sound to what ever you want thanks to manipulation features found in any Digital Audio Workstations. You can drag and drop samples, arrange it, and have a full track. But keep in mind that it doesn't as simple as it sounds like. We'll take you through on a journey on how to properly utilize audio samples for Music production.

Know your sample

There are basically two types of samples; one shot and loop. They are different but you can turn a loop to a one shot, vice versa. Let's see the difference shall we?

One Shot

One shot samples are single audio samples that does not repeat that you can arrange yourself to create a groove. One shot samples most commonly came in form of drum kit. Take a look at this following picture:

Logic Pro X Arrangement View

As you can see, there are audio files color coded in blue. All blue cells above are one shot samples arranged together, per sound making a solid groove. Each tracks are named after the one shot samples it corresponds to.

Though most commonly came in form of drum kits, you will also encounter one shot melodic samples. The easiest way to utilize this kind of one shot sample is to take that one sample and put it to your software sampler, depending on the note that the sample carries, you can play melodic one shot samples with your MIDI keyboard or draw them on a piano roll. That is one intuitive way to play with unique sounds!

Loop

Loop samples will get you inspired. they are basically samples that have been arranged by producers for you to use. There is nothing wrong with drag and dropping loops, but you can always manipulate loops to make the sound truly you.

To do this, you can cut and rearrange the loop, or even layer one loop with another loop and your own melodies to make unique sequence never heard before.

Broaden Up Your Music References

Listening to other musician / producer's work is essential to get yourself inspired. Your audio samples is your tool to spice up your production, and people's music is your gold mine of inspiration. Challenge yourself to arrange the most simple to the most complex grooves your can imagine by listening to great tracks you found.

Now you know the basics of audio samples, so where can you get them? Don't worry, we've got you covered

The Internet

No need further explanation about this one. You can surf the web for sample packs. Primeloops, Rankin Audio, Unmute are among the best websites for your sample digging. 

Other Musicians, Sound Designers and Producers

Get linked up with other musicians, sound designers and producers. Not only expanding your production knowledge, but sharing is caring. Sharing session between musicians is a delightful experience that you don't want to miss. 

The Random Brothers and Slicecult recently threw a sampling fiesta at Queenshead Jakarta.

The Random Brothers provided amazing gears from boutique synthesizers and drum machines such as Roland Jupiter and Yamaha DX7, and Roland TR-09 Drum Maschine and of course, Random Brother's Eurorack modular synthesizers for you sample hunters to collect.

Don't miss out these opportunities. Watch out for music creation events near you because you'll be delighted!

Words by: Najmi Ismail

Digital Pro Mixing Technique: Instrument EQ

EQ or equalizer is a tool to equalize the frequencies on a track. EQs came in tons and tons of flavors, ranging from affordable to utterly pricey VST/AU plugins but they all function the same; boosting and cutting any given wanted or unwanted frequencies. Puzzled? We'll take you through the basics.

Remove Unwanted Frequencies

The human ear could approximately hear frequencies as wide as 20-20Khz. These remarkable numbers enable humans to differentiate between wide varieties of sounds. When combined together, these will create a bunch of noise that sounds pleasing to the ears if they are treated well.

In digital mixing, the EQ's main purpose is for removing any unwanted noise or artifacts, resulting in cleaner and better mix when applied to all music elements throughout one composition. Let's take EQing a kick drum for example. 

The kick drum is the low-frequency percussive sound. It acts as the foundation of a track's groove. They sit really low in the mix and requires good treatment, especially when it comes to electronic and dance music in general because the kick drum determines the track's groove.

Before starting, we have to know the range of the kick drum's range in the frequency range. To do this, EQ's built in analyzer came in handy. The Analyzer helps to visualize where the sound sits in the mix. See the following screenshot:

As you can see above, the kick sound occupies a large amount of frequency presence around 50 - 200 Hz.

Depending on how you want the kick to sound like, you can filter and cut out inaudible frequencies those are visually present in the analyzer to achieve the body and thump of the kick and providing space for other instruments to sound freely. Here's an example:

Alternatively, you can decrease the amount of the filter to increase the Attack / Snap of the kick itself. looks something like this:

Boosting Inaudible Frequencies

You might encounter an occasion in your production when you want to boost some frequencies those are inaudible in the mix. to do this, you can simply do the opposite; boosting the frequencies you wish to boost.

By: Najmi Ismail

Organic Thrilling Sounds From The Apprehension Engine

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If you love horror and thriller movies, you all must be familiar with all the eerie sounds those get you goosebumps and chills your bone to the core. Have you ever wondered where all those sounds came from? 

The instrument is called the Apprehension Engine. It looks and sounds as unorthodox as you can imagine.

Mark Koven is a Toronto based composer for film and television, This guy has been scoring horror movies and he got tired of using digital suspense samples. He came up with an idea of making an instrument that will produce organic eerie sounds, playable and actually sounds good.

Watch how we utilize the Apprehension Engine for "MATA BATIN" Movie Soundtrack:

Apprehension Engine is built with unconventional elements you won't see on your very conventional bass, drum, guitar, and piano. This instrument is built with bowed metal rulers, cool spring reverbs, metal rods, and other crazy stuff to make the scariest sounding instrument on the planet.

By Najmi Ismail