S1E3 v i v: Creating Dreamy Vibes and Producing to Support the Environment

Producer v i v stops by to talk about her creative process and the importance of not giving up.   She discusses how she was able to springboard her experience with classical guitar and jazz into a passion for music production.  She mentions how much inspiration she has found from video game soundtracks and also gives some tips on how to give tracks a dreamy sound.  Lastly she talks about her release Deep Blue for Tsunami Sounds’ environmental compilation album, Save Our World.

Episode Links:  

v i v:

  • Spotify: 

Influences and Inspiration:

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Episode Summary:

Viv’s musical background is diverse, but it starts with learning classical guitar.  She played in grunge and metal bands and explored various styles early on.  One of her early inspirations was artist Hikaru Utada who wrote music for the Kingdom Hearts video game.  In particular, she found it inspiring that Hikaru could compose, play music, and sing her own music even at a very young age. 

She believes that even time on an airplane can be used for creative purposes too.  She likes to experiment with plugins like Native Instruments’ Reaktor.   She finds this to be an excellent plugin for sound design.  In addition, she likes the Korg Monologue for its portability and step sequencer.  

Viv often describes her music as dreamy and minimal.  When she writes music she likes to focus on the feeling and the mood first.  Also, many of her melodies come to her in her dreams.  She will often wake and take voice notes and sing them to capture them.  When writing melody she likes to keep from getting too cliché.  She likes to play with different voicings or take the melody on a journey.  At the same time, it should be simple and easy to listen to but without being too simple – just push the boundaries a little bit.   

   

One of her favorite ways to begin is with a simple piano sound or Rhodes.  She will begin with a chord progression or melody.  She will often then develop the idea with the guitar and also get into sound design.  To her sound design is more important than complex melodies because the sound design will dictate the atmosphere of the track.  In producing her track for Tsunami Sounds, she created a dreamy yet underwater feel for the track.  She accomplished this through a combination of low pass filtering, chorus, reverb and delay.  Naturally her tracks also need to include fitting and interesting drum beats.  Viv also loves to use grain delay and ‘break’ a sound to make something new out of it. 

On mixing, v i v does believe it is possible to mix on headphones.  However, she thinks it is best to have both headphones and monitors.  This allows you to perceive how others will perceive the music in certain environments.  She thinks the most important thing in treating the room is to identify the problem frequencies in your room and quality bass traps. 

When stuck on a track, Viv recommends that you ‘don’t give up’, but instead explore new approaches.  If you’re stuck in the Ableton arrangement she recommends moving your loop to the session view and changing at least one aspect of the music.  This could be the instrument rack or the beat for example.   Always be creating here, and then arrange your new loops.  If you still don’t like them, try chopping them up with a sampling plugin such as Simpler.