To be an ORIGINAL, try COPYING other artists.

there's all these things that happen when you clone a production that have little to nothing to do with your style as an artist when i came away from that the next song and songs that i did sounded nothing like the beatles my production sounded nothing like the beatles didn't have anything to do with that had to do with all of the lessons of musicality and the production trickery and the weird arrangement choices and the strange mixing choices all of this stuff came into play i learned so much [Music] welcome to kush after hours my name is gregory scott tonight i want to do a quick one and just hit you up with creativity and originality a lot of you out there like me are artists trying to find your way find your own sound trying to make it i don't know easier to express yourself and you know me i'm a bit of a fan of the zen paradox the cohen if you will the sound of one hand clapping the things that can't exist at the same time ironically one of the ways that i really got in touch with how to express myself with true authenticity and originality was by copying artists that i love and when i say copying i mean copying cloning actually i've done some cover songs in my life and generally my approach to cover songs has been to make this thing as different as possible from the original what i'm talking about tonight is cloning a work of art in this case a song and the first time that i did this i did it with a beatles song for my father who at the time was 60. he was up there a bit and he was not in any way shape or form a musician but he for his 40th wedding anniversary with my mother wanted to give her a gift of him singing their song which was uh something by the beatles i had no he asked me to help him with it i was like oh sure i can do that because i wanted to do that i had no idea how i was going to do that and so i set about recreating a beatles song and you know of all the artists to try to recreate that's a this is definitely an interesting one to undertake especially because i was not in any way shape or form a beatles fan at the time didn't really know much of their music other than a few of their most popular songs and i got to it and i started with the drums i went over to a friend's house who had a garage and an old ludwig kit and we sat there and we studied the recording and then we set up a bunch of microphones over the drum kit and we kept drilling it down to okay let's use this let's use that combination this microphone here that microphone there and we discovered discovered that the kohl's 4038 microphone over the drum kit one of them just it had that flavor that was kind of it but in the process of doing that what i really learned was that it was the tuning of the drums and the way that i played them that was far and away the most important thing you could swap out microphones you could play around with mic positions but the way we tuned the kit and the way that i played them as i studied ringo and the headphones and i'm thinking bitty tappity and playing back and listening and everything i had to embody ringo i had to kind of get his feel and he's got this weird thing when he does drum fills where he just sort of like goes a little bit slower and the swing gets wider the swing of the groove which i think also corresponds to the swing of his arms he's just he was a left-handed drummer and playing a right-handed kit so things got lopsided for him when he did drum fills the point of all this was that with the drums i i got that my first lesson of my god the tuning of the drum kit and the way that i play it far and away was how to cop the vibe it didn't sound exactly like the recording i think that's possible it was recorded in abbey road studios on old tape machines old preamps and everything we didn't have that stuff but man we got really close we got the vibe of it down pat with that one mono ribbon microphone over the kit and me just playing it the right way when i say the right way i mean the most authentically like ringo hitting the drum the right amount of force the right balance between the kick and the snare and this is what i'm talking about when i say cloning the song i then went through and i did that with every instrument with the bass i had a hollow body bass that was the right thing i had to play it with my thumb to get that sort of sound that paul mccartney had on that song was thumpy sound had to roll off all the deep bass because there just was none on the recording learned a lot about production learned a lot about bass tone the learning experience was extraordinary in recreating the song i would hear elements that i never heard before because i would be i'd have okay i think this is kind of it let me see how this is coming along and then i'd be like something's not right here something's missing it's it's a sound what is that sound to figure out what these sounds were in the recording and then okay how do i recreate that with the tools that i have you get really creative about that kind of approach to problem solving so there's there's all these things that happen when you clone a production that have little to nothing to do with your style as an artist like that that influence that that effect will happen but really it's just all of these creative obstacles and hurdles that in some way shape or form the original artist was probably dealing with in the studio and then you have to confront your own version of those in the recreating of the music as well there's a string section in that song huh so i bought my first string vi at the tips was 2004 i think computers were not really up to the task of running vis very well at that point in time so i did a lot of printing and a lot of bouncing i learned a lot about string arrangements it's a pretty simple arrangement but nevertheless when you don't know i didn't know music theory i didn't know i knew how to play the drums and passively strum some chords on guitar so this was an exercise i had to get a ringer guitarist and a friend of a friend who worked at a cafe that i was like do you know anybody plays guitar and he's like yeah actually my friend right he came over we got rip and baked and we sat down we tried to figure out how do we recreate this guitar sound there was effects on the guitar i didn't even know what they were and i identified one of them accurately which is a bit of a slap back echo but there was another one on there that i later learned was leslie on the guitar i didn't know that sound i didn't know how to recreate that sound my version of the song doesn't have that so i failed on that front i failed on quite a few fronts i missed the harmony in the last verse things like that but i got a lot of the harmonies and i didn't know anything about harmonies i knew very little about harmony at the time i learned a lot so the point of all this rambling and and check out the description of this video if you want to listen to my version of the beatles and this was done by me 16 years ago maybe 14 years ago i can't know time doesn't matter anymore right the point is i was maybe breaking into the intermediate stage of my engineering and production at that point in time so i listen to that now there's so much that i would do differently there's so much that i would be able to do to get it more accurate but the point is this was a huge huge step for me creatively as an artist and as a producer and when i came away from that the next song and songs that i did sounded nothing like the beatles my production sounded nothing like the beatles didn't have anything to do with that had to do with all of the lessons of musicality and the production trickery and the weird arrangement choices and the strange mixing choices all of this stuff came into play i learned so much so i recommend this highly for you it doesn't matter what style you're in what you're up to what kind of music you're about the artists that inspire you or don't if you've done a million covers in the past that is not what i'm talking about here cloning a work of art and if you were an art school hopefully you weren't but if you were or if you know somebody they know if you've ever been to a museum at some point if you go to museums enough you will see students sitting there with their sketchbooks copying the works of the masters they understand that's how you learn you're going to be doing perspective in your drawings you know it's not that you want to paint like rembrandt or caravaggio you want to just understand the play of light and shadow and how to create that in yours it's the same thing with music and production same thing with all art really so copying cloning the works of art that you find inspiring trust me you're going to have a good time doing it it's also going to drive you insane but you're going to learn so much and if you do end up doing it bless your soul please post a link down here in the comments section so enjoy the journey enjoy the process my name is gregory scott this has been kush after hours [Music] bye

Channel: The House of Kush

Views: 59,469

Keywords: Drums, Guitar, Bass, Bass Guitar, Drum Buss, ubk, Analog, Digital, Analog Gear, DAW, logic, pro tools, reaper, ableton, slate, waves, producing, record producing, record production, how to mix, how to mix music, music production, EQ, Equalization, Compression, Equalizer, Plugins, Audio Editing, Sound Design, Record like the beatles, mix like the beatles, abbey road, how to copy a mix, drum like ringo, sound like the beatles

Id: XLU-mW40wuE

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021