LITTLE CRICKET

Plug-in Order: A Real-World Example

What a Little Cricket Session Looks (and Sounds) Like Right before I Record Vocals

Here’s what I accomplished throughout the week and a little bit about how and why I planned my week this way.

I try to do something music-related every day.

Creative people tend to thrive on spontaneity. This makes for good art, but poor time management can be a huge barrier to productivity.

Vocals, though usually the main attraction in a pop song, can play many roles.

This burden requires a bedroom producer to take great care when engineering a vocal recording session.

Sampling is the use of recorded audio as instrumentation.

Software synthesizers are some of the most accessible and versatile compositional elements available to a bedroom producer.

The technology available in 2021 bypasses many of the limitations there are to recording a real acoustic piano.

I like to take the same approach to recording electric guitar that I take to bass guitar.

The acoustic guitar makes a great songwriting instrument for several reasons.

The bass has a way of gluing the other elements together, mediating the rhythm and the melody, and telling the song where to go.

This is most often the case with hip-hop and ambient, but electronic drums can find their way into pop music and even rock, on occasion.

Shakers and tambourines are great for adding energy to a song and filling in the rhythmic gaps left by the drum kit.

Due to their piercing tone and their duration, crash and splash cymbals make great accents to a beat kept by the shells.

Shells, the more transient elements of the kit, consist of kick drums, snares, and toms.

Legendary 90s post-hardcore band Fugazi even experimented with drum kit doubling on their last album, The Argument.

Voices vary greatly from person to person, they tend to have a huge dynamic range, and human vocal chords are susceptible to all sorts...

Sometimes it makes sense to do things "out of order."