Major Project Proposal

For my major project, I will be doing a song off of the Cambridge website by an artist named “Uncle Dad” called “Who I Am”. This is a country song, a genre that I am not too familiar with and I am looking forward to see what I can do with this song. At first listen, I wan to make this song pop more than it is right now. It seems a little bland, the guitars seems too loud, drums are pushed too far back. I would like to mix this in surround sound, so the only place I could mix would be in 006.

The timeline for this, I hope, will be in 006 every thursday from about 10 am to 2pm. I won't probably work on it the whole 4 hours every time, but it will give me enough time per session to do some real work on this song. As I said, the only place I could mix would be in 006 because I want this in surround sound. 

I am doing this genre because it is one that I am not too familiar with. But if I had to choose two songs that I would like this to sound like, it would have to be “Somebody like you” by Keith Urban. This song is a little more poppy than “Who I Am” but it has some of the same instruments and I can build off of that to hear what I can do. The second song would have to be, “Sure I'd Be Cool If You Did” by Blake Sheldon. This song, has some of the same instrumentation, but is a bit more on the rock side. So I will try and take some of that sound and put it into this song. 

I don't have any reference tracks right now. I think “Somebody like you” is a good track, but I need to do some more research and find a good reference track.

What I really want to try and do and have the guitars on either side of the listener, the banjo more towards the center of the mix. I really want to experiment with the drums. I want to try to keep them more centered during the verses , and then when the chorus hits, have them explode all around, then go back to more centered during verses.

Since I am new to this genre I have only rock backgrounds to really go off of, very distorted guitars, everything is compressed. I want to try and bring a little bit of that but try something new and keep things more dynamic and free. I want everything to sound as natural as I can get it to sound. How that will happen is to be determined, but I don't want a lot of compression and heavy reverb. I want to be a minimalistic yet as productive as I can get. 

Listening to this song, it seems that there isn't a lot of miking problems which helps me out a lot for EQing and bleed. One of the hurdles I know I will face is the drums. They are very thin and doesn't seem like there is much to them, so I will have to really work on them to have them really pop. Panning will be fun, but also a hurdle. Trying to find what goes where and how much effect I should send to what channel will really be an issue, but I believe I can get through it. 

I think this song will be extremely fun to mix in surround sound. There is a lot I can do with it and am looking forward to see what I can do.