Jack Cleary

Music producer and writer of the blog "A day in the Life of a Music Producer".Debut Album "The One Who Became Many" scheduled for release in summer 2018.  Website: jackclearymusic.com

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Day in the Life of a Music Producer #1

Lyric writing in the car

sometimes you find yourself short of time between writing lyrics and band practice. If this is the case: take a note pad, record a rough version of the track on your phone, cram in the car and get the creative juices flowing whilst operating heavy machinery! 

Oh sorry, where are my manners, hello, my name is Jack Cleary and I am the music producer and writer of this new born blog. I wish to share with you the stories from my career as a music producer, I work with some interesting and amazing people! One of those people is Vincent, also know as Fitz from Fitz & Yeah. When I met Vincent it came apparent to me he was a very talented lyric writer! Any producer with their head screwed on will tell you to keep the talented lyricist close, they are few and far between! 

So what were we writing in Vincent's car on the way to practice? We were writing the lyrics for a soulfully electronic music track I had composed and produced about 2 months ago! I knew it had to have a vocal on it (although, I lack the ability to write good lyrics without them coming out cheesier than cheddar)! So I acquired help from Vincent. even though I had capable hands on board we definitely have struggled to write the lyrics! Vincent said “I never spent so long writing lyrics for a track”! Over the last 2 months we have grouped together four to five times to write the extremely difficult lyrics! Yesterday we agree to meet to finish the last verse; we were determined to get the lyrics finished, but it seemed the Brighton and Hove City Council were out to stop us! North Street (The vain of the city) had been closed and the city had been traffic congested, Especially on the road leading to my house! originally we planned to meet at two pm, Vincent didn’t arrive until fifteen minutes past 3. At which point we had to set off to band practice, firstly we had to drive to Lorna’s (The Bassist) place to pick her up. On the trip to Lorna’s we got the first half of the second verse finished, but the lyric flow came to a halt as we picked up Lorna and turned our travels onwards to Micheal’s (The drummer). On arriving to Michael, Vincent, Lorna, Micheal and I practiced vigorously for 3 hours solid. If you don’t know, band practices can be mentally draining and tiring, This was one of those practices. After practice, I started to fell the euphoric tiredness kick. I don’t know if it helped the lyric process, but despite all of our troubles we had finally finished the lyrics, celebratory selfies was in order! So what is the next step? Now that the lyrics are done we must record them soulful vocals, which will be provided by my sister Angel! I shall write a follow up blog post after recording the vocals. The track will arrive to you in November, to make sure you get the release for FREE sign up to my newsletter through my website, at:

http://www.jackclearymusic.com/info.html

In the mean time, you can get another FREE track entitled JazzyMan from my up and coming debut album “The One Who Became Many” at my BandCamp:

https://jackcleary.bandcamp.com

Fitz & Yeah band page:

https://www.facebook.com/YeahTheBand/?fref=ts

Angel Cleary’s Cover of Black & Gold by Sam Sparro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_BP4Sp4bp8

Angel Cleary’s and Jack Cleary’s cover of You know I’m no good Amy Winehouse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkaOrimTqwo

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Just bought a vibing vintage Hawaiian shirt. #summervibes

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Experimental electronic music composition 

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#generativemusic making progress on my generative peace/piece, not sure which is the greater pun! #maxmsp #medative #meditation

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Uploading promo for my #experimentalmusic composition magnetic soundscape. Available 27th of May

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#maxmsp #music #generative #DMSA

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Recording guitar to a track I'm writing. Working on an album, follow to keep updated!

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Playing around on my microkorg XL and randomly worked out fancy by Iggy azalea

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Could this be love, Original by Jack Cleary

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A composition for gentle ears! Home by Jack Cleary

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Bass being dipped by kick, Side-chain Compression. 

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This is drum compression on a bus. I sent my kick, snare, overheads and toms on a bus to a aux channel. on the aux channel I had a compressor set to 25.4. I set the threshold so it was compressing the drums by about 6-8 dB. This added and extra punch to the drums once mixed in. This was for my Star Craft 2 trailer re-score

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I decided to practice the art of music and the moving image by taking a Star Craft trailer without a score. 
when I approached the trailer score, I wanted the music to function for the trailer by deliver tonality.  I also wanted to have a brand new take on the score, I didn’t watch any official Star Craft trailers to pick ideas from and to warp my creative choices. I also wanted to focus on melody, creating several phrases and a main theme, heard when the man is walking on the platform and at the end credits.

I began the project by importing the video into Pro Tools. I decided I would write down the timecode’s of music cue’s in a notepad, after writing the timecode I would write down idea’s for the music. For example when the film cuts to the man stepping into the boots, I wrote “01:27:17 action music starts… building, toms”. The numbers at the start is the timecode and I wrote my notes beside the timecode. This helped me organise where music cues would be and how long they would they would last. Adding descriptions for what would happen at cues made writing the music more purposeful. For example; The cue after 01:27:17 is at 01:55:05 and the description is “Hero music”. This is the scene where the platform starts to raise. I thought the shot looked epic and the viewer got a good look at the hero. To portray this in the music, I focused on major chords to lift the music up and change the mood from tense to epic. Adding the short descriptions let me know what harmonies to use. 
Each music cue has it’s own tempo, this is so the music fits to the film. Using tempo operations in Pro Tools is the way in which I got the correct tempo for each section of the trailer. To do this I click on events, tempo operations, constant. You must click advanced before you can do this. You have to do them in order, after you’ve entered your tempo changes you can edit them later. start on bar 0|0 (this will appear under start and beside selection) and then enter the timecode for your first cue (under end and beside timecode). change the end bar (under end and selection) to desired bar. This will create a calculate a tempo, if this is the desired tempo you want press apply. 



For the rock sections of the track I recorded through a 30 watt VOX Valvetronix VT20+. I placed a sE2200a condenser microphone 3-4 inches from the centre of the cone and 3-4 inches from the cone. This gave a low, darker tone to the distorted guitar. I recorded a second guitar through the same amp (If I had another amp available to me I would of record through that) I used an MXL 441 condenser cardioid microphone. I pointed the microphone towards the centre of the cone from a 45 degree angle about 4 inches away from the cone. I choose this because I made a very warm sound with a lot of definition.
 The synth elements I played my Microkorg XL directly through my mixer. This gave me a purer sound. The main synth sound (That can be heard as the music is first played) was manipulated by WS depth which effected the saturation of the sound by pushing the sound waves further apart.



I used compression on every instrument on this track to squash the dynamics making the tracks more present in the mix. The ratio determines how much the track is compressed. I’ve got a 7:8 ration on my percussion track. For ever 7 Db that passes the threshold 8 dB is pushed down. This makes the peaks softer. I did this because it worked well with the type of electronic percussion. and kept it present in the mix. Once compressed I pushed the gain up by 2dB to increase the volume of the track. I’ve used an EQ on this track, I have taken out the low frequencies. I have set the Freq to 57.8 Hz and set the gain to -23.5 dB to take out most of the sub frequencies and left some room for the percussive bass frequencies at 60Hz. This helped taken the muddiness out the mix. 

To balance the rock part of the trailer the guitars I recorded were panned hard left and hard right, this helps give maximum stereo width (I did the same with the Horns and the strings). To help balance the track some frequency tracks bass and kick drum I had a compression on the Bass guitar track that was triggered by the kick drum, this is the technique called side compression. This would reduce the bass guitars volume every time the kick played. 
To add more punch to the drums I set up a bus that went to a heavily compressed tracks with a quick release. This makes the drums really present. I mixed in the compressed Aux track to preference.

 Practicing to this trailer has encouraged me to try new things and grow as a film composer and I’m glad I took the time time create something I’m proud of. I will carry on to find projects to work on before heading to university in late summer.

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This is my score for a Iron Man scene, the footage isn’t from the final cut of the film. 

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The past, present & future of Roo

I have explored the art of playing electric and acoustic guitar, using various techniques like sweep picking and harmonics to improve my knowledge and practice on the guitar. Piano has taught me a lot about music theory. Piano has greatly helped me understand, pitch, harmony and scale. My strong sense of rhythm has improve by playing the bass guitar. I also have basic practice on instruments such as the harmonica and ukulele. Music practice has made me adventure into collaborations with other musicians, the largest project was Indie rock band ‘The RItts’ with singer/song writer Jacob Gallagher. We played in venues all over the UK we soon became a professional band getting paid for the gigs we played. The band had a 2 year run time. in that time great experience was gained, performing, collaborative writing and music business were all skills I greatly improved on in the band. After the separation of The Ritts, I decided to work on a solo project to focus on building upon my vocal performance and song writing abilities. I have played paid gigs around the Wiltshire area where I moved independently. I studied Music Technology at college, this entered me into the world of recording. recording music is where my interest has took me. In college, I gained experience using recording equipment such as DAWs, Mixers, microphones, MIDI instruments/controllers. The interest in recording music compelled me to go onto work on recording projects, recording myself and various artists. Some records even made it onto radio! My musical taste (Tokyo Police Club, Two Door Cinema Club, Twenty one Pilots) has made me explore synthesisers (Software and hardware). I used many types of synthesis in my remix of Still into you by Paramore like FM, Physical Modelling, and Subtractive. 
Presently, I’m working on self constructed band “Sexual Squid” which my role is to sing, play piano and program synthesisers. Sexual Squid will be performing gigs in June, July and August of 2016 before I head to Brighton to further pursue a music career. Also I am building upon my home studio, which will be the base for my pursuit into work into composing music for games, films and TV programmes. In preparation for composing music for the moving image I have bought Komplete Ultimate by Native Instruments. Komplete Ultimate comes with Reaktor, which lets you construct your own pluggins like synthesisers drum samplers, delays and sequencers. I plan on utilising Reaktor to learn more about creating software instruments and effects. I want to take on the role of a producer in the foreseeable future, using the skills I have built on through university and practice to create great original music.