Naomi produces music

from composition to recordings

by herself !

 

Naomi Saurus

 (⇧ She is Naomi Saurus, an ambassador of Naomi's music, Nice to meet you !）

 

 

Naomi produces like this;

 

 

1. Composition

 

I often write music while playing the piano. 

Usually, I decide the theme of a work before I compose, but to reach the good form of a work, even I don't know how long it will take.

Sometimes, it took 5 minutes or 1 month in the cases I have experienced. 

When I'm really convinced of the melody, chords and rhythm of works, I see what I should do in the arrangement.

 

2. Arrangement

 

In my case, I often arrange in a silent situation without playing any instruments, except for the tune for the specific instrument.

 

3. Programming

 

From here I turn on my computer and use a music production software to make my music. 

To perform music on a computer, we are required to program each of the notes how duration, strength, timing and tones they have, etc.

So this "programming" section is none other than the work that I make the musical datas.

 

You might see it's hard to do this section, but don't worry!

Music production software helps us make music intuitively and musically. 

 

Music production software is often called "DAW", which stands for "Digital Audio Workstation".

The reason why they are called "DAW" is that if we only have DAW, we can record our music composed and arranged, then we can complete the music to deliver to each of you!

 

Thanks to DAW, I can produce my songs by myself.

I really appreciate all the technicians and developers of DAW. 

 

Using DAW, we can also make the datas with musical keyboards, but I prefer to use a mouse and keyboard on my computer.

In this way, I feel that making musical data seems to be writing sentences by a computer. 

 

In parallel using DAW, I also boot software synthesizers.

Software synthesizers are the synthesizers that work on computers, I often call them "soft-synths". 

 

You can listen to their sounds on my works, the "Game Pop" or "Monochrome Night".

All of these tones are soft synths' sounds!

 

I think you will find that soft synths have a lot of variations of sound, they are sometimes imitations or recording sounds of real acoustic instruments, sometimes unique electric sounds. 

And these sounds contribute musically, because they can be controlled how they sound. 

 

I really appreciate the technicians and developers of synthesizers as well as DAW's!

 

 

4. Recording(mixing) 

 

After the programming section, I prepare recordings.

Recording is the literal meaning, I record my music on media, like a hard disk, but why do you think recording is also called "mixing"?

 

The answer is, because recording is the work in which we mix many tracks or notes.

The track is a minimum unit of recording. For example in recording, if we use many instruments, we should record each of the instruments into each one track, and then finally we make all the tracks together. (Of course, we may also record all of the instruments at one time, like a classical concert.)

 

For example, let's talk about "Game Nostalgia".

 

   "Game Nostalgia" has five tracks;

(1)melody part track

(2)chord part track only sounds in left speaker

(3)chord part track only sounds in right speaker

(4)rhythm part track

(5)bass part track

 

In the recording section, I mixed these five tracks into one stereo track.

So this work is sometimes called "track down", or "mix down", because the track number is down from five to one.

In other songs, "Space Shooter", I mixed 124 tracks.

 

And as for (2),(3) above, I also decide what position each track sounds for the speaker. This work is called panning. Panning makes stereo phonic.

 

Most important thing in mixing is considering balance, because balance influences musical impression!

So the base of mixing is balancing relative each tracks' volume, don't you think it's simple?

 

Other things that I do in mixing are using effects.

Effects have many variations, reverb(make sounds reverberated), delay(make sounds delayed), equalizer(make specific frequency gained or cutted), etc.

Effects are also used on each track.

I think these effects are often used in many recordings, it helps us to make sounds rich.

 

 

5. Mastering

 

Mastering means originally to make a master for a factory-pressing LP or CD, so mastering in this section is exactly called pre-mastering.

But here, I call pre-mastering as mastering.

 

In mastering, I balance the volume between song to song, sound quality with equalizer, and duration from the end of a song to the beginning of a next song, etc.

To raise sound pressure of songs is also often done in mastering, so I was actually worried whether I should do or not by the end when I mastered "Game Pop".

 

But finally I decided to let sound pressure not be raised, because raising sound pressure sometimes has a risk of breaking balance or happening accidental distortion;

In the recording section above, I carefully balanced each tracks' volume and made the depth of sound.

 

In my opinion, the depth of sound is one of the most important elements in music.

So I'm sorry to bother you, but I hope you will enjoy music by turning the volume suitably!

 

 

6. Preparation of release

 

Before I make the agreements with musical platforms, I have two important things to do to run my business certainly.

 

(a) To register my works to my copyright society, so my works are administered properly and internationally.

 

(b) To apply for ISRC(International Sound Recording Cord) of my recordings to national ISRC Agency; 

     ISRC is the code that helps us to recognize and administer sound recordings.

     We must make sure to combine one ISRC with only one sound recording.

 

After this, I prepare to make agreements. Since there are so many musical platforms, the agreement agency helps me.

 

 

 

Thank you for reading! I explained roughly from my music production to release.

Although I make my music only by myself, you know that I'm not alone thanks to reliable organizations, companies, and you!

Sorry if my explanation may not be clear, I will improve it. 

 

Please enjoy my songs!