Production

It is time to make more progress on that EP which you’ve been working on. The end goal is to have three or four tracks that you can be happy with by the time you release, which will be… well, whenever it’s finished is the real answer, but you find that giving yourself a deadline helps you to stay motivated. Figuring that Burn Week’s going to be hell and that you probably want to be done with this stuff before then, you tentatively mark two Sundays before then as the day to release. That gives you a month and a day to work your magic.

Is that enough time? If it was your full time job, you’re pretty sure it would be plenty, but with classes and sports and lab and girls to consider… you’re going to have to carve out some time to finish this.

With that out of the way, you pull up the tropical house song you’ve been working on. It’s little more than a skeleton at this point, and you find yourself having fun with a nifty marimba line that starts to get you somewhere. You spend a while tapping out a couple rhythms, not really satisfied with the way the drums are playing out. The kick’s more or less set in a 4/4 pattern, that’s a staple of the genre which you’re not going to mess with, but you swear there’s got to be something you can do with the snare…

Switching in some handclaps resolves your dilemma; turns out you just needed a different sound. As you play back what you’ve got so far, tapping your foot in time to the beat, you mull the big question in your head. What about the vocals?

There are some people online that you’ve reached out to in the past who would be happy to collab on this project, you’re pretty sure, and from the perspective of a producer looking to put out the most polished product that you can, it’s the safe choice…

But you’ve just gotten onto a college campus chock full of talent, and surely there’s got to be some girls around here who can sing, right? Your mind starts to travel places, thinking about all the things that could go right following a successful release, or even a hot recording session in the studio, and all of a sudden, you find yourself not wanting to follow your professional instincts.

You remind yourself that you’ve got time. Look, worst case scenario—you find a cute girl on campus to do the vocals, she turns out to be trash, and you get one of your contacts in the business to do the job right. Sure, you’ll hurt the feelings of the cute girl, but you’ll be done with her at that point anyways, right?