One of my favorite things to do is to support artists who are working for social change. So it is with Ian Willey, (a.k.a. I.C.Will). Ian is a public school teacher in New York City and writes “education movement music” designed to raise consciousness about public education issues in NYC and to boost the self-esteem of students.
Ian is a lyricist, primarily. He gets his beats tailor made by Chris Capable of Capable Beats. Chris builds his beats on Ableton Live, using their VST plugins and instruments and his own collection of keyboards and synths.
One of the issues we had, recording I.C. Will’s first EP (check especially the song New York Sky), was that Ian had Chris provide him with stereo WAV files only. This limited the amount of mixing we could do in order to build the beat around Ian’s vocals.
We’re now recording his second CD. For this CD, he’s asked Chris to send bounces of each track of his own mix, especially keeping the bass tracks discrete. We anticipate getting a much phatter mix this time around.
Ian’s voice is naturally full of low frequencies – he’s a low baritone. He doesn’t like this all that well, and generally asks me to remove much of the low end from his voice in the mix. He likes his vocal acapellas to cut through the mix somewhere in the upper mid range.
For the first album I.C. did a lot of vocal doubling, which took a lot of time. He didn’t feel that it had to be perfect, but he wanted it close. On the new CD, he’s backing off from this, and doing more single track vocals.
He also wanted to sing some of the vocal hooks on the CD. He’s not a trained singer, so this took some tracking to get our system and workflow going. Sometimes we’d negotiate the pitch, going back and forth, till it was within tunable range. For the most part, however, he was able to sing and double his parts easily.
Ian is an amazing human being and a great performer.
Check out the first CD at CD Baby. It’s some amazing music.
Jonymac Studio 