Making of the Album - instrumania

Instrumania (2014) is an electronic music album, composed/produced by Raziur Rahman. It's more of a concept album and it's difficult to pin it down to any particular musical genre as a whole. But I can say that the music in this album draws influences from progressive rock, metal, classical music both eastern and western, jazz and film-score/sound-tracks. The abstract quality of the music of this album is quite noticeable. In this post I will be talking about ideas behind the production process and share lots of screenshots to give you a better view of the making of this album.

A little talk about the concept behind it

The concept behind this album is change. You will feel each track is different than other. When you start listening to the album, you might feel that, the tracks, they just keep changing from each other and within each track change is implemented extensively. These changes are implemented using a musical concept called scale change or modulation. A diverse array of changing has been experimented. The theory behind these change are not directly derive from the well established western music theory but rather implemented in a free experimental way. Experimental freedom was the key driving force behind making this album. There is no track in this album that do not contain some form of scale change.

The instrumentation of the music is fairly straight forward. I tried to minimize the use of instruments and the sound of the overall music is somewhat clean and quite. You will not find heavy beats and strong bass like that is found in popular electronic/ software studio based music, rather the sound of the album is quite clean, acoustic and sharp. All of these are intentional. I made this album to express and experiment with some of my ideas that I have been developing the last twelve years while playing guitar and other instruments.

Production software

instrumania was not made in a few weeks. It took eight months to finish the album by working full time. Each track is quite complex and as a whole it's not that easy to show how it was made using some screen shots provided below, a video would be better.So here is the link of the Youtube video of the Track 2 called Fly, which give you a better tour of the production process.

instrumania was made entirely using the music production software called Reason 5 by Propellerhead. In Reason, instruments and effect processors are arrange in a virtual rack. When taking screen shots they just don't fit in the screen. You need to scroll and that can only be shown by capturing it in a video! So, below are just some brief discussions and some screen shots to give you a taste of the making process!

Workstation

As a beginner music producer, I don't have a fully fledged studio. I am more of a bedroom producer! The setup I have used includes: my old PC, a MIDI keyboard and average consumer grade headphone and speaker, to compose and produce this album. But do not underestimate my setup as I entirely worked in the software environment, all the acoustic sounds are supplied with the software and they are of high quality, all the performance data are recorded using MIDI keyboard and there is no audio recording in this album.

Instruments and effects

Various instruments and effects are used and quite complex manual signal routing was performed to get the desired sound. Many of the bass and lead sounds are produced by a synthesizer called subtractor. I tried to minimize the use of different instruments to bring a consistency among the tracks, you will hear hear piano a lot. The album uses Reason's Subtractor, NN-XT and Redrum instruments extensively. Rest of the instruments just appears when they are needed.

Sequencer

Music is performed and programmed in the sequencer. Performance notes are quantized to get the perfect timing! Reason's Block feature and tool window was used extensively for composing/arranging music on the sequencer. The album consists of 11 tracks. Below you can see the sequencer view of a track:

Mixing

There could be said a lot about mixing and mastering. But I will not go there because I am learning about it by producing this album. I learned a lot from the Reaper user guide about mixing and advanced sound routing. I wanted to make an entire album using Reason 5 which I had access to. I used the basic parametric equalizer mostly to equalize most of the instruments. Each drum channels are also equalized. Care was taken so that a clean and sharp sound can be achieved.

The basic idea that I used while mixing this album is to create volume and panning balance among the tracks and also a balance in the frequency spectrum, so that one instruments don't overpower or mud other instrument's frequency content.

Mastering

I used MClass Effects at the mastering stage. A pack of Equalizer, Compressor and Limiter was all that was used to master all of the tracks. Care was taken so that all of the 11 track sounds similarly and also gentle mastering was applied. Keeping a somewhat better dynamic range, meaning it would not be the loudest album and there would be sound level variations. Thus giving it a somewhat acoustic or natural feel. After rendering, I used Audacity to insert some header and trailing silence and some fade in/out.

Cover art

This album was an one man production, so, I made the cover art my self. First a cover layout with title and name text was made using GIMP then it was imported into Artrage where it was painted with digital water color! Well I wiggled!

Distribution

I exported each master track in FLAC format as FLAC format almost reduces the WAV file upto half the original size thus save my uploading time and Internet bandwidth. And then I uploaded all the tracks to Bandcamp. I chose Bandcamp over soundcloud because I like the features of Bandcamp!

Final words

instrumania was my first music album and the whole production process was not only educational but also a lot of fun! I am just happy that I was able to share some of my musical idea with the world! I understand that I need to improve more on mixing/mastering and also on the compositional aspects of my music and I also need to buy some decent hardware!

Last updated on: 11-Oct-2017