Take That - Babe - v1.2

A song from the period of boy bands. Yet somehow I grew fond of it. The gradual instrumental build-up is a pleasurable and offers learning opportunities due to the better clarity of the fewer instruments. It's a song about love and life or whatever my melancholic cat has in his mind :-)

The v1.2 update contains mixing updates for the vocals and backup vocals. I increased their volume levels and adjusted the effects.

Bass

Just improvising with the root, fifth and octave notes.

Keyboard - electric organ

I found no sheets of this song so I just matched the melody line of the organ.

Keyboard - backing violins

I searched a lot in my soundbanks for a better match for the ambiental sounds from the original recording. The closest I got were the violins.

Piano

Bass chords and arpeggios while moving an octave up and down in the various sections.

Vocals

With a higher than usual vocals volume range this song should have been harder on the vocals. I however enjoyed recording it. It's very possible that having known the song well from before did help significantly. I should have increased its volume though a bit more - maybe in the next version.

Acoustic Guitar

Arpeggio during the verse and strumming for the rest; a pretty basic acoustic guitar treatment.

Backing vocals

This song really needed the backing vocals but I'm only starting to understand what it takes to create half-decent tracks of this kind.

Drums

A lot of hi-hat in the early parts of the song, then a section of rimshots leading into the full drum line.

Electric rhythm guitar

I used bar chords to avoid pitch overlap with the acoustic guitar. I'm still learning my new Helix LT unit and the sounds I can get out of it.

Mixing

As I am reading Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio I try to apply ideas that I can relate to. At this point I'm not willing to make too many alterations over what has been recorded. Still, in this song I worked on adjusting the volume level of the instruments across the track: lower the violins volume until the end of the first verse while increasing the drums volume in that same section; lower the volume of the acoustic guitar when the electric rhythm kicks in etc.

Misc

When editing this video, I attempted to use Cyberlink PowerDirector 17 Ultra hoping for better performance most likely because it wasn't able to use my GeForce 980M for hardware acceleration. I'll work on a fix so for now I finished the project on my usual MovieStudio 15. I found a very useful setting there (Create Video Proxy) which allowed me to render a lower res version of the video tracks to speed up my editing. Still, the final rendering took around 20 min (as opposed to my usual 7-8 min). It could be the increased bitrate of my new camera (Canon 60D) or something wrong with the GeForce drivers. I'll investigate for my next video.