Lush – After Death

This post-mortem blog will reflect on the collective that is ‘Lush’ and the production of our first track, ‘Citrus’. A reflection of the planning, processes, teamwork, a technical analysis as well as the final submission will be analysed and discussed in order to look at distance travelled within this project as well as to establish the finished product. We will also take a brief look at some interdisciplinary work that was established throughout the project.

Lush was comprised of Carter Kraaijmaat, Riley Guerin and myself (Connor Arthur) and was formed due to our personal friendships and similar musical tastes. As a group we decided that, with Carter’s expertise in psychedelic sounds, especially guitar, as well as Riley’s and my own interest in synth sounds that we could create something ‘Lush’, hence the group’s name. As the project moved forward I began to learn a lot from Carter and Riley. They both know a large amount about their respective musical interests, with Carter being a genius on the guitar and bass, as well as Riley having the most insane knowledge about electronic music production. I largely worked on documentation during the early stages of the project and took a step back from production due to my lack of knowledge, however as I learnt more from these two I put more ideas forward and aided as best I could with the creative process.

As the project began, we initially came up with a drum beat straight out of the gate which we all really liked and this provided a staple for the track:

The next thing we decided that would be included in the track was some guitar, played by Carter. Going in, we had an idea of the chord progression we wanted and decided on the key of C Major. The chord progression we decided on was Gmaj, Emin, Gmaj, Amin. Each of these chords was played for 1 bar. This is the dry recording of this:

After adding an Overdrive, a Ping-pong delay and some EQ to the guitar we finished with this sound and stuck with it:

After this, we went on to create various other elements to the track, including:

• Lead Guitar.
  • We added various effects to the lead guitar to make it suitable for our track. First of all we added some Overdrive to get some more tone out of the dry lead guitar track. We then put Ableton’s native amp plugin on the guitar to amplify the signal and to achieve the tonal qualities we originally set out to achieve. EQ was then applied to clean up this signal. After the EQ, some slight compression was applied to the guitar which resulted in some noise reduction. We then EQ’d the guitar a second time to filter out some of the harsh high and low end sounds which allowed the guitar to sit much better in the mix. This is the overall result of that:

From here, we created various other elements and added them to the track. Including several forms of bass including synthesised bass, sub-bass and played bass, synth keys, synth arp, strings, some white noise and wave samples in sections.

Overall, I am really happy with what the track turned out to be. Creating it was a massive learning curve for me and has inspired me to learn as much as I can about electronic production. Have a listen to the final track: