Myself by Ziiana | Pop | R&B

🎶 GENRE:
Pop / R&B Remedial Production: A commercially competitive pop track built from the ground up, designed to leverage R&B elements for depth and mainstream appeal.

💡 WHAT I DID:
Co-Composition & Remedial Production: Hired to rebuild the instrumental after the original production failed. My role involved co-composing new parts (bass, melody layers) and handling the full re-arrangement, mixing, and mastering to achieve the desired pop feel.

✅ MY CREATIVE CHOICES:
The goal was to eliminate the "local" feel and harness competitive R&B elements. I re-voiced the piano chord section to sound like a cinematic grand, eliminating the original "cheap VST" quality and establishing the foundational texture of the entire track. The tiny original bass was replaced with a Reese bass processed via the "Noah 40" technique (sample rate reduction, filtering, saturation, and depth reverb) to achieve a thick, warm, and lo-fi sound with exceptional depth. To combat ear fatigue, the arrangement uses strategic silence/breaks to "reset the ear" before main sections.

🎚️ MY TECHNICAL CHOICES:
Surgical repair was required across the mix. For the vocals, I used Melodyne to fabricate new parts from the existing pre-recorded takes. Rhythm and groove weaknesses were fixed through comprehensive drum enhancement: I swapped the original kick for a new sample and used transient shaping to ensure a harder hit. This was paired with MIDI augmentation, where I balanced the percussion groove by eliminating hits working against the rhythm and adding new hits to ensure every part worked as a cohesive unit. Tonal clarity was achieved through multi-stage EQ (subtractive, additive, dynamic, and flavor EQ). Bass layering was managed by keeping the 808 in mono and the OVO Reese bass in stereo, using spectral sidechaining to prevent frequency clashing between the low-end elements. Two-stage selective sidechaining of the vocal bus was used as final dynamic insurance for presence.