Comfortable Lead By Yaria Neemah | Afrobeat | Dancehall

🎶 GENRE:
Afrobeat / Dancehall Fusion: A club-ready Afrobeat foundation supplemented with a Dancehall rhythmic drive.

💡 WHAT I DID:
Re-composition and Production: Tasked with creating a completely new instrumental around existing, pre-recorded vocals. Handled full composition, arrangement, mixing, and mastering.

✅ MY CREATIVE CHOICES:
The production objective was to fuse Afrobeat with Dancehall, leveraging the artist's Jamaican accent. The rhythm features a driving Dancehall snare/rim groove balanced against an Afrobeat Fela Kuti-style clave. An evolving, synthetic guitar/pluck groove pilots the song from start to finish. To combat repetition, the arrangement strategically uses an 808 for a club bounce exclusively in the verses. A sub bass drives the pre-chorus transition. The chorus features a layered bass foundation (sub bass layered with an analog synth bass) and utilizes an orchestral arpeggio burst to create a momentary tension and energy surge into the next musical cycle. Similar synth sustain bursts are used in the verses to pilot transitions. Dynamic pauses are utilized throughout to refresh the musical cycle.

🎚️ MY TECHNICAL CHOICES:
Overcame severe inconsistencies in the pre-recorded vocals (clipping, uneven dynamics, and poor mic placement) using iZotope RX, manual automation, and strategic chopping. Due to mismatched backing vocals, I used Melodyne to fabricate new vocal parts from the existing pre-recorded vocals. Tonal and structural clarity was achieved through multi-stage EQ (subtractive, additive, dynamic, and flavor EQ). Two-stage selective sidechaining of the vocal bus against the music was used as the final dynamic insurance to maintain the lead vocal's presence. Dynamic consistency was further achieved using parallel saturation to lift weaker sections.