The challenge of sound

Today we wanted to highlight one of the more interesting aspects the sound engineers for Ginny Vee need to think about as the "Ginny Vee Project" gets underway.

Over the past few years there has been a major shift in not only where music is bought - but how music is listened to. And the Ginny Vee team is acutely aware of this as they engineer the sound layers into the songs.

It's one thing to build a song that will only be listened to by sound engineers #soundengineers or Music Producers #musicproducers that have access to studio grade music systems. Systems that are inside acoustically tuned studios. It is another to have someone with Apple Earbuds in, on a busy underground train.

The dynamic range of each system is so completely different. One of the key inputs from the sound design team has come from the new production company. they want to create the sort of sound that will be powerful and clear on the full spectrum of sound devices, compression formats and music players.

A source at Billboard in late 2013 stated that physical sales of music by CD (or the rebirth of Vinyl) accounted for about $13 Billion (down 50%) - while sales of digital versions of music were at about $10B and Apple's iTUNES owned a whopping 41% of that market.

Extremely interesting was the release of Beyoncé's new album BRAVE which was given a pre-release on iTunes only. This was shown to anger many "bricks and mortar" stores which had previously been the main distribution point for such artistic works.
( Article on release here)

With this shifting trend it is not only important to have different #masters of the song - that will help when various compression systems are used such as VEVO, YOUTUBE and iTUNES - but what Ginny wants to incorporate are sounds that are "compression" friendly. The bass lines, the drums, the synths and guitars are all being highly selected in meeting after meeting to ensure that when layered and mixed they will be as rich as possible on digital media in small earbuds, as they are on classic media. This is challenging as it must not detract from the artists brand and sound. Over the coming weeks the Entire Ginny Vee Project team will be focused on trying to achieve that delicate balance.

Project Studio

Yesterday Ginny Spent three hours in the project studio with the Producer, Arranger and Manager for the Ginny Vee project.

The Project Studio, run by Roberto Cola, is designed to be an experimental music laboratory #projectstudio. This is where the creative process takes place, initial tracks are laid down and the first vocals are recorded. Once the team has a solid first version they will take the tracks to one of the larger production studios such as Forward Studios based near Rome. #forwardstudios

Here the songs will be layered and mixed to create a unique Ginny Vee sound and music brand. This will give the depth and richness to the music to create a truly international level song. 

In the three hour session yesterday several key decisions were taken: which will be the first single, what will be the unique Ginny Vee sound and brand. Aspects for the art direction, video direction and imagery that will be created around Ginny.

But, as is the function of the project studio - a new song was in its embryonic stages - and the music writing team, and Ginny were thrilled with the first draft of what could be on of the first #singles to be released during 2014. There is a lot of hard work ahead - but the entire team walked away energized by the direction and the energy in the project.