just add soul

i wanna try and get abit more of a soul and rnb sound in my pop rock productions

anyone have any tips?



p.s.bit of a stupid question i know

thanks

-Dean-

yeah, the sound is one thing...analyze recordings, experiment. the soul, well...that's an intangible.

Funky James Brownish geetars with dashes of B3 organ and some horn stabs.

Well, those are useful ornaments, but I think there's something about that Stevie Wonder 'swing' to it, that it needs somehow. It's very much 'rocking' (like rocking a baby), and also on the longer run in the songs they rely heavy on very predictable 'circular' rhytm in that regard.

Compare 'Caravan of Love' by Isley Jasper Isley and the version by the Housemartins, which is not bad at all, but lacks that 'something'. It's too empty really for a capella, and the audience picks that up - starts filling in the beat - for them, I don't think it's mere enthousiasm. No pauses, please. So that's one way of taking soul out, IMO. Same song.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ARl3dUyAyc

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JdVltlpSNC0

Other than playing the parts with lots of emotion and spontaneity, you would also want to go for that classic R&B/Soul sound, a more tube drive sound, with a round bottom (we all like those of course) and somewhat rolled off highs, nice overmodulated drums with a classic feel to them (i.e. some room and some ring, not highly damped modern drums), a low bass, fairly high passed guitars, some stabbing horns of course. And you have to find some female backup singers.

ORIGINAL: bitflipper

While "soul" may be a vague term to describe an intangible quality, it does not completely defy objective analysis. The biggest factors working against "soul", "groove", and "feel" are quantization of drum tracks, excessive pitch correction, over-processing and over-compression. These conspire to suck the life out of a song, as they squash the natural variations in the performance that are critical to making it sound like human beings created it.

One simple tip is to try not to rush a song to completion. Unless you're under the gun to meet some deadline, let the song mature at its own pace. Really learn the song well, so that you don't have to read lyric sheets or chord charts while tracking, so that you can really listen to yourself during the performance. Let the song sit for a while between tracking the instruments and laying down vocals. My experience has been that the song gets more soulful and expressive the more times you perform it.

i was listening to an interview with george clinton yesterday (from the future of music conference, which i recommend) and he was speaking to why the old funk stuff is so heavily sampled. his response was that he, james brown, etc., made such cheap recordings. leaving the sounds more open to further manipulation. hank shocklee thought it was due to the times, the environment, the people, the equipment...something you simply couldn't recreate these days.

i'll agree with the notion of letting things lie, taking their own time to develop, and nurturing an organic, unsystematic approach.
this is critical for any type of music...or anything else for that matter.

So, is it modern RnB (Beyonce style) or classical RnB/Soul? For a classical feel use tube distortion, don't quantize to much and let it be a little rough around the edges plus think of something that get your emotions going one way or another while making the song. The soul is about soul so get in contact with your soul to let the soul out

For the new sound, over quantize, over compress, combine sampled string sounds (and maybe a harp?) with fast synth blips and some sweeps plus feel free to experiment with different intrumente and don't only play them as they can be played for real (with the computer age there is no more limitations). Spend time in the layering of your drum sounds though to make them snappy and club danceable. In many types of this music the drums are mixed alot louder than in other musical styles, it's the beat more than the melody that is the main actor and that goes for some of the instruments as well playing more rythm patterns than actual melodies wich are essentially handled by the lead vocal.

Depends on the song... Oooh Child, Walk On By, Past Time Paradise, No Sunshine, Smiling Faces, Girls It Ain't Easy and What's Going On etcetera don't really make me want to hug the world but they all make me feel and gives the impression that the persons performing them are sharing their actual emotions.

just add soul

This has got to be one of the funniest thread titles I've seen.

Things that are representative of soul/R&B:

Drum and bass parts that have accents on the upbeats and the "ands," and/or that work the accents in unusual or unexpected ways. Accents on the one and the three are generally no-nos, unless they they are specifically there to draw attention to the "non-soul-ness" of the part.

Varied arrangements. Avoid the typical rock approach of having all the instruments basically hammering on the same riff.

Musical space. Different parts occupy different frequency ranges, and individual instrument parts leave breathing space so that different instruments are coming into the foreground throughout the arrangement.

Dynamic vocal delivery. Again, working the space *between* the beats, and avoidance of singsong melodies. In soul/R*B styles, the lead sheet and written melody are often just a sort of starting point or suggestion, and the actual performance may sort of "suggest" the melody without ever actually playing or singing it.

Deconstructed or substituted chord arrangements. No self-respecting soul artist would be caught dead strumming quarter-note open chords on an acoustic guitar or playing boogie-woogie piano. Again, like the melody, the chords and tonal arrangements are often sort of built in the holes around the chord chart, and it is common to have an entire arrangement where no instrument is ever actually playing the written chords.

A lot of it comes down to taking for granted that the audience is going to feel the beat and pick up on the underlying chord and melodic structure whether you actually include it or not, so you build your track *around* that stuff. The captured arrangement effectively becomes a sort of accompaniment to the implied "song" that the audience hears in their head, but that may not even be represented in the recording. Arrangements also tend to be rather "light on their feet" with instruments weaving in and out of different roles. Different instruments may be playing completely different or even disconnected-sounding parts.

Contrast this with say the blues-based classic rock approach, where you have two guitars, an organ, and a bass that are all basically playing the same riff or repeated figure, or slight variations thereof, and where the drums typically bash out accents of the riff, and where the typical vocal approach is to have a measured, consistent, "singable" delivery, maybe even chanting. With this approach the idea is to convey the musical concept forcefully and powerfully.

With Soul/R&B styles, the sound is sometimes almost defined by what is left out, and by what is not there, both in terms of the overall arrangement and in terms of the individual instrument parts (ever tried to play a James Brown song on just an acoustic guitar?). The style is built on the way that the different parts interact not only with each other, but also with the "phantom center" of the underlying song that may be implied more than heard.

Cheers.

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I'm creating a new word: Hypnostructure

ORIGINAL: droddey
I'm creating a new word: Hypnostructure

hey, cool word .. of course in the angular avant-garde jazz world that might be spelled something like "hip ... no structure"

ORIGINAL: Roflcopter

A lot of it comes down to taking for granted that the audience is going to feel the beat and pick up on the underlying chord and melodic structure whether you actually include it or not, so you build your track *around* that stuff.

I was refferring to that. Sortof what I said about the audience filling in the blanks, plus your additions about the 'open' chording.

There's probably a scientific word for such an 'invisible skeleton', it just won't come to mind.

From a musicological POV, there is nothing terribly unusual about implied notes or harmonies. Bach was probably the master of both implying harmonies with a single melodic line, and also using implied notes to suggest chords that are significantly different from the actual sounded notes. And the phenomenon of the ear filling in missing fundamentals is well-known to audio engineers, and is the basis of effects such as waves maxbass. And certainly everyone understands that there can be implied beats that are not actually sounded.

One of the things that has traditionally seperated Soul/R&B has been a greater tendency to "work" the song, i.e. to take structure for granted and then to build in the rythmic and melodic spaces around and between it, as opposed to the more straight-ahead rock/pop approach of delivering the melody and chords clearly and forcefully.

A perfect example is James Brown's "Super Bad"-- it is barely even a song, as the album version goes. Is there a melody? How would you even begin to meaningfully transcribe the lead vocal? If you tried to play the vocal "melody" on an instrument, would anyone even recognize it? If you were to play the guitar part from it, a savvy listener might recognize it, but it in no way sounds like a "song." Indeed much of the guitar rythm becomes sort of nonsensical without the other instruments present to indicate where the beats are. The same is true of all of the instruments-- there is no real structure there, just accompaniment parts and accents, all to a "phantom center" that is nevertheless not only very clearly there, but in fact extremely forceful and powerful in spite of the fact of only being implied.

Similarly, even in modern drum-machine R&B, there is very often no discernable "center" to the song in terms of a core instrument or clear melody, although the material is certainly *not* atonal or free-form, in fact it is often constructed from heavily-quantized samples.

Contrast this with say the beatles' "yesterday" where you have a very clear, very strong melody, and very fully-developed chords, but with somewhat relaxed timing and performance gestures. IOW, the difference is not simply about being "loose" or unstructured or improvisational.

I should also say regarding the above that I am talking about "Soul/R&B" as a genre, and not about "soul" as an elusive quality of conveyed emotional depth or whatever.

Cheers.

My friends and I call it 'playing in the cracks', though we associate it more with funk than Soul or R&B, but of course there's often a fair amount of funk in either of those. Everyone is playing when no one else is, or trying to. As I've mentioned in previous discussions, Stevie Wonder's Superstions is an excellent example of this. It has quite a few parts but they are all finding their own place and playing in a very syncopated, percussive style. It's an incredible thing when you can really get it tight and popping like that. None of the parts by themselves would be very interesting or recognizeable.

A perfect example is James Brown's "Super Bad"-- it is barely even a song,

Funny enough that's not 'soul' by my Stevie Wonder Headswing Lithmus Test, but it's very funky. Piece of art, indeed.

There's a compilation of the timeperiod called Superbad Funk & Cinematic Soul. This would go in the (aptly named) funk dept, for me.