The first thing I did was look to my friend the internet I managed to find out all manner of information about how the track came to be the anthemic sound and one of the most liked sounds of the 90's
I watched a documentary on you tube called Common people the story behind the hit http://youtu.be/h3wUANrCwmU .
This documentary revealed some of the fundamentals behind the writing , the inspiration ,the driving force behind the track . About halfway in there is also a small part of the studio processes and crafting the "feel" of the single .
This would come in useful in the recreation of the single for my assessment.
So time to start with the recreation
Firstly I am going to look into the chord progression and start to break up the instruments used to compose the single .
The first thing that jumped out at me was the electronic sounding bass synthesiser
That runs through the intro it is a 8 beats per bar format . I looked towards a Vst called MASSIVE for this purpose , I got down the main chord progression for this but it sounded to clean and clinical so I added a distortion plug in (name ) and a touch of reverb set to hall then a flanger to finish the bass at this stage
The next step I chose was the cheap sounding synth that plays the main melody line i know this was a Casio MT500 through reserch that would have used basic wave forms manipulated to make all the presets so I found a basic sine wave and set to work to make it sound more like the original , I adjusted the LFO envelope to make it sound less chime like and more of a synth sound . Originally at this stage I would have met up with my drummer but he couldn't play "live" drums at that stage as he was not able to come down on the days we had originally set aside for recording the percussive parts to the song .
So I set to work and made a midi take on the drums I got the feel right and put in a volume envelope so I could manipulate to velocities I would need to bring the drive .
After research ( sound on sound ) I found out that the real drums were in fact recorded in a bare brick room so I took this into account with the compression and reverb I used on the drums .
It was now starting to take shape my next step was the piano parts that sit beneath the "cheap synth" they add movement and pace and are in my opinion the glue that holds the performance together .
I then watched loads of live performances of "Common People"
and started to pick the electronic violin parts apart looking at notation and the chord progression that was the easy part , the actual noise I used was a mixture of 4 different VST string sounds compressed together with 2 VST synth patches and then bounced into audio then I added ambience in the way of a reverb plugin and delay plugin .
I then started to look at the electric guitar parts I had worked out the notation and found a guitar emulator called SLAYER to get the initial idea down this would be then run through a tremolo effect and coupled with a real recording of a fender strat to give it the sound I was looking for .
I tried to put a rythem guitar part to complement the choruses as they had done on the original using a shure sm57 as they did on the original but couldn't get it to sit right on the track it started sounding "muddy" so I left this part out of the finished mix .
Next was the BPM of the track the original changes from 120 BPM to 140 BPM in a gradual change through till the last chorus I found this hard to recreate without changing the pitch of the track so I left the BPM at 120 .
Now it was time for the vocal , unfortunately I couldn't get the person I had approached originally to perform on the track so I stepped up and did the vocal myself it was hard to recreate Jarvis Cocker's vocal as I didn't have the same range , I could have manipulated the pitch of the track to more suit my vocal but didn't want to change the overall sound to much .
The final mix down was straight forward as I had been mixing every part as I added the various components into the overall mix so at this stage I listened to the original several times alongside my own recreation and tried to make it sound as authentic to the original as I possibly could , overall I'm quite happy with the project thanks for taking the time to read my blog :)
