Dub Side Project: Post Mortem

I'm stoked to say that I've finished my dub track and have uploaded it to SoundCloud! I've learned a whole lot about the dub genre and all the process that goes with making a dub track. A lot of critical listening was used to strip down and analyse my reference tracks so that I was able to identify important elements/characteristics that I needed to have in my dub track. I feel like I need to work on this track a little more as I want to change some of the levels and settings of some of the plugins, but I have to admit, I was getting pretty sick of working on it at times, so I just had to finish it and upload it. Might work on it in the future (probably not).

Design Collaboration

Also, I know I haven't updated you guys on this project for a while, but I also asked a design student to help design an album cover for me, so that when I make more dub tracks, I'll put them into an album and will already have a album design as well. It'd also help me get into more interdisciplinary work as I haven't really worked with students in other disciplines besides my 2nd main project with some games students. I prepared a brief for her describing what I was working on and what I wanted her to design for me, and also included a mood board with potential ideas for an album design. For the album name, I previously chose Leleuvia as it was an island where my family and I used to go to for a day, and I just remember the island just being really chill and relaxing, which is the feeling I associate with dub and reggae music. Here were her 5 rough designs that she created after going through my brief and mood board ideas.

I thought all these ideas were really great that I wanted to have them all, but it's kind of impossible to have all of these ideas crammed into one tiny square so I went with idea 2. I went with this idea as it showed a female and that was one of my main messages for creating a dub track: to show that females can make other male-dominated genre of music as well. I also then changed my album name to Reef Roots instead as I thought it'd be hard for people to pronounce the previous name, and this new name still relates to the island as well as dub being one of the main roots for most genres today. After exchanging ideas and emails, she then delivered her final design, as well as a record label design.

Really glad I got to collaborate with a design student, as I've never done interdisciplinary work before and it was a good experience! Really hope to work with this design student in more future projects as she is really talented and I hope to help her with any audio work that she needs in future projects also.

Finalising the Dub Track

So, during this whole process of making the track, I also had to come up with a title. I then decided to call is "King Pablo" as I've been inspired by both King Tubby and Augustus Pablo's work to create this track as well as they have been one of the first dub artists I've discovered, and this is my first dub track I've made.

Regarding finishing the track, something about the bass rhythm was just not clicking with me. I decided to make a new track and just improvise new bass rhythms using the same melody so that I could hopefully come up with a better rhythm that had some sort of groovy feel to it. And I did.

Other things I had to change were the hi-hats, as they were a little to loud, especially in the higher frequencies as most roots dub tend to sound lo-fi. Because I had two hi-hats playing at the same time, one louder in the higher frequencies than the other so I just brought it down, and just added more spring reverb to both of them and it kinda worked.

I've been having a lot lot of trouble these past weeks trying to get the kick to sound more audible as it is one of the most important elements in dub. Before adding the kick, I was just relying on the bass and it's rhythm to also act as the kick but I kept listening through my references tracks and I could here that the kick was actually cutting through the bass, and could hear the levels of the bass were lower than the kick. At the end, I ended up having two kicks playing at the same time, which raised the kick's decibel level and also was able to cut through the bass.

I added more vocal samples throughout and added the ampLion plugin so that I was able to get a lo-fi effect with the vocals, and also added reverb and delay to them as well via busses.

Throughout making this track, I was also trying to find a free melodica plugin/VST online so that I'd be able to imitate Augustus Pablo's famous element of having a melodica melody in there, but I just couldn't find one that was accurate enough so I chose this reggae kinda organ from Xpand2!, which suited the feel of the song too.

Summary

Really enjoyed working on this project as it has taught me a alot about analysing reference tracks and then implementing them into your own track. Because I'm on holidays now, I hope to make some more dub tracks and I really want to put out a dub album as well, as this project has really motivated me to. I also enjoyed working with the design student and hope to work more with them as I am also interested in graphic design and hope to get into it one day.