Ricky Garvey – Music Production, Mixing, Mastering

On April 4th, I released a new single called ‘Bayou.’

You can check it out below. 

This track is super special to me. It’s a song written by a friend of mine Zach Barker. Zach writes a ton of funny songs and he’s also one of the most talented people I know when it comes to writing songs in general. 

Bayou was a perfect blend of funny and sincere and when he wrote it in 2020, my oldest daughter couldn’t get enough of it. She’d want me to play it constantly. And the funny thing is, all I had at the time was a video of him playing it. No official recording. 

View this post on Instagram

As I’m a couple years into my sobriety, I still find myself trying to fix the past and make things right. Doing my own version of this song felt right to me and a way for me to feel better about the past during the years that things started to take a turn. 

So I attempted to transform his folky country song into a Recoverer track – full of synths and acoustics and washy vocals. 

Acoustics 

The original song was done as an acoustic folk song so I knew I wanted those elements of finger picking folk style even while I planned to wash the song with bedroom pop indie rock synths. 

It’s 4 tracks with 2 parts recorded in stereo and panned slightly different. The second sent of tracks come in a bit later and I used a capo so it’s separate parts. 

For processing, I went through some Safari Pedals plugins – specifically the Camel Strip and Fox Echo Chorus. The Fox Echo Chorus in particular added a really lo-fi vibe and it’s bordering on distorting. But almost gives it a really pushed tape emulation vibe. In solo, it sounds a little distorted and intense, but in the mix, it just contributed to the overall lo-fi vibe. I basically pushed it as far as it could without sounding too bad. 

Synths 

There’a bit of a Recoverer palette I use in my Logic template. It’s a combo of mostly Juno synths. I have some presets I’ve created for pads and washy chorus-y atmosphere. I have a lead line. And then I typically always use the arpeggiator since I love it and it always seems to add something I like to most of my tracks.

I also use the Juno for a sub bass for most tracks and in this song, I used it to bring in the sub starting at Chorus 1. Low end is handled by this sub bass along with a pretty mid-range bass. 

Vocal Production 

Vocals are the same approach with my template. Nearly all parts are triple tracked, with the chorus having even more layers. Backing vocals are as washy as can be and I use the Waves pedalboard plugin and use the spring reverb.

This was a fun one and it felt into place nicely. I’d like to credit my template work for making recording and producing way efficient, but the truth was I was blessed to have such a strong foundation with Zach’s song structure. It made it super easy to follow what the song needed every step of the way.