Production Concepts and Techniques for The Great Leap
I have long felt the need to simplify things in my own music while maintaining its diversity and fullness. That's often a difficult balance to strike. It's not just about the arrangement of the songs but also involves the lyrics, melody and overall vision of the production. The technology of music making has exponentially grown over the past ten years and we now have at our disposal an abundance of software, hardware, sounds and techniques for which to create music. With this, naturally, comes the temptation of abusing these resources of simply being lazy in the process of a production. I truly feel what we hear nowadays in Chinese music (myself to blame as well) is superfluous in terms of production values. Instrumentation, lyrics, and melodies are layered upon layers of meaningless elements creating not one cohesive song or sound but rather fragments that cancel each other out. Truly, the theory that "less is more" has been forgotten in music and, perhaps, everything we do.
Therefore, in this album, I have attempted to "limit" myself in the production and arrangement of the songs by keeping instrumentation down to only four distinct instruments. This returns to the more traditional setup of a four-piece band or quartet. For example, of a song were to have drums, bass, guitar and a piano that would then constitute as four distinct instruments. I would not "allow" myself to add additional instrumentation but would rather either substitute something out or alter a particular part to so it works better within the arrangement. If I felt the need to add strings in an already complete four-piece arrangement then I would be "forced" to remove one of the instruments so as to allow adding the string part. These seemingly restrictive "rules" would actually push me to think outside the box and make the instrumentation more meaningful instead of just simply adding more sounds and parts to create a fuller arrangement. This is perhaps a reductive method of production rather than an "additive" one but the outcome, in my mind, leads to a larger and more transparent soundscape.
This "four element" method has also been somewhat distilled into other areas of the production such as in the background vocals, melodies and lyrics. What I've tried to do is to keep each element as simple as possible so that it is accessible and easy to digest upon first sight and listening. You'll find less background vocals and parts than in previous songs of mine because I would hold back till I absolutely felt the need to add them. Vocal or instrument parts that were usually layered two to four times now are only stacked once. What you may find is that things have, in fact, gotten larger and fatter rather than smaller or narrower as one would expect. The attitude, character and performances of parts (vocals and instruments) has also been kept in their more original, raw form rather than edited or overly polished. What I'm attempting to do is to capture the honesty of the moment rather than creates and piece something together that sounds "perfect". Once you realize that you only have four instruments or elements to work with then you become more critical and tuned in to what each part is playing within the arrangement. Each instrument and song will sound thin, incomplete and dull. Rather than adding more parts to enhance a song, you now must work out and design a part till it fully complements its three other counterparts to create a single, organic and dynamic arrangement. There is less room for sloppiness, as your must trim the "fat" so that each part is a well-greased cog within the arrangement machine.
