Day 1 — Psicofonía Studio
October 2, 2019
After months of pre-production, the time finally came to have our first production session at the studio! I will be working at Psicofonia Studio with Charles A. Leal, its CEO, producer and audio engineer. I was introduced to this place by Diego Montemayor (who is also a producer working at this studio) when he saw me perform at “Abraza tu Arte” in February. For years, I have struggled to find musicians/producers that have my same creative style/vibe. I was beginning to feel tired of doing everything on my own, and wanted to get more people involved in my project. Diego invited me to the studio, where I met Charles for the first time. Luckily I had some mockups in hand so I was able to show them my music. I felt at home instantly, and it made me really happy to see how they listened so carefully to my tracks (something I feel almost no one had done for me before). They told me they had experience working with this type of music and we talked a little about the bands they have collaborated with. I went home, did my research, listened carefully to their past work, and finally decided to trust them with my album :)
During this year I’ve been carefully crafting 8 songs that will be part of the album. For the ones that are not familiar with the process, a pre-production stage is when you define the structure of the songs, work the melodies, lyrics, harmonies, and do a mockup of every song to sketch the general concept of how you want them to sound like. I can honestly say that I’ve been working on this project for a long time since some of these songs are a few years old, and some are pretty recent. This album is very personal and precious to me. It tells the story of my battles with mental health and my 20s’ existencial crises. Hence the name of the album ‘Spirals’. Each song is a little cycle I try to break. That being said, it was extremely important to me that Charles and I sat down and talk about each song with lyrics in hand.
Day 1 at the studio started off by taking care of the technical work of building up the sessions in the studio’s computer. This means importing audio stems, fixing tempos, and adding the right time signatures. Once all of that was taken care of, we dived deep into every song discussing meanings, interpretations and me sharing what inspired me to write them. I was surprised at how easily I talked about lots of personal things. I knew it was bound to happen because I want every person involved in this project to really immerse themselves in what I’m trying to say with my art, but me being a shy introvert, I thought I was going to have a hard time opening up. Turns out it was a very smooth process, and we had a deep and long talk that covered every song nicely.
So now I think we’re ready to dive in once again into technical stuff. Me being a perfectionist and overachiever, I might have gone a little too far in my pre-production and ended up stepping right into a well defined production stage with my mockups (oops!), so we’ll have to define really well all the elements that we’re going to work on at the studio and make a plan based on that!
That is all for now :) Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more updates coming up!
Cheers!
Monica Lyrae