Arts & Entertainment, Music

“Savior” Songwriting Demo: Final Mix

Lesson time 13:37 min

Watch Annie in the control room, where she puts all the pieces together using studio tools and shows you how the track became what it is today.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: Tracking Savior · The Final Vocal · Finishing the Record

St. Vincent

Teaches Creativity and Songwriting

Explore your creative process and embrace vulnerability with St. Vincent, the Grammy-winning, genre-defying artist and performer.

Preview

[00:00:00.46] [MUSIC - ST. VINCENT, "SAVIOR"] [00:00:03.69] - I love being in the studio. It's my favorite. It's my absolute favorite place. Anything is possible. Anything is possible in the studio. It's so exciting. [00:00:18.37] SONG: You dress me up in a nurse's outfit. [00:00:23.06] - It's very easy to write alone and come up with a lot of great ideas, generate a lot of material, flesh out a lot of things on your own. But at some point, you'll probably want to go into a proper recording studio. [00:00:37.88] Especially when you're trying to track things like live drums, acoustic instruments, big pianos, things like that, you kind of want to make sure you have good mics and good gear if you want to capture the actual sound of the room. That's a lot of the reason why people go to studios instead of doing things at home is because it's a physical space. And also, there's a lot of great gear and mics and all that stuff. [00:01:05.57] When you're walking into a studio, automatically you're going to have other people around, be it the studio assistants who are helping set up the gear. Maybe it's a producer. And so you're going to have to know how to talk to people and know how to get your ideas across. [00:01:27.63] In my experience, having the-- a little bit of technical know-how regally helps because you can talk to engineers. If you're looking for a sound, you can go, oh, well, what I want is a plate reverb, instead of going, well, I kind of hear kind of airy. And then you're at the mercy of somebody else's idea of what "airy" means and their own baggage with whatever effects they have and their own personal tastes. [00:01:58.12] But also, you know, the reason to collaborate with people is that it's going to be better than what you could've done on your own and different than what you could have done on your own. That's the whole reason to collaborate, is that it gets to be the joy and excitement of discovery. [00:02:14.20] And that can be sometimes difficult to sort of personally navigate and know why you're doing what you're doing, in order to make sure that you're not making decisions based on fear. That's kind of an art killer, in my experience. When you get too in your head, when it's too much about being self-conscious, it's a real vibe killer. [00:02:37.21] There are a lot of ways to write and a lot of ways to see it-- your song to completion. One of the ways is to have everything really planned out, have all the parts written, have all the words written, you know, know things like, it's going to be this tempo and it's going to be in this key and all those things that are really crucial to the DNA of the song. [00:02:58.69] And at that point, I would say it's very safe-- it's a safe bet-- to go into the studio. A lot of people like to experiment and explore in the studio, too, though. So if you end up getting in there and things change, that's cool, too, because so much about the process is being opened to being pleasantly surpr...

About the Instructor

Under the stage name St. Vincent, Annie Clark has won Grammys while remaining fiercely innovative and true to herself. Now Annie is opening the door to her process to teach you how to explore your creativity. Learn how to record music, write songs, improve your guitar skills, and embrace your vulnerability. Let Annie guide you through the ups and downs of creating art so you can share what’s in your heart with the world.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

St. Vincent

Explore your creative process and embrace vulnerability with St. Vincent, the Grammy-winning, genre-defying artist and performer.

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