‍James Blake is a British singer, songwriter and producer known for pioneering a minimal, bass-heavy strain of electronic soul — sparse arrangements where every element is drenched in processing, and restraint does most of the emotional heavy lifting.

This time, I'm doing a cover of the first verse and chorus of "Trying Times", focusing on vocals, guitar and bass synth. Watch my performance video and then read the step by step production tutorial below!

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TRYING TIMES VOCAL PRODUCTION

The vocal is actually three layers stacked together. There's the main vocal carrying the lead line, a second layer pitched an octave down that comes in on the chorus for extra weight, and a third layer with pitch and formant shifted up, higher, almost childlike, sitting behind everything as a backing texture.

For the main chain, I used Auto-Tune Pro for tight, subtle pitch correction, followed by Virtual Mix Rack for some analog console color. CLA-2A handles the dynamics, an 1176-style optical compressor, and two instances of FabFilter Pro-DS clean up sibilance before FabFilter Pro-Q 3 shapes the tone. It goes through Virtual Mix Rack once more for glue, and finally out to a ValhallaVintageVerb send for that long, dense reverb tail. You have the full tutorial on the youtube video!

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TRYING TIMES GUITAR SOUND

For the guitar, I used Neural DSP's Archetype Cory Wong, set to the "Go to Clean" preset for a bright, clean tone with a touch of warmth. On top of that, ValhallaUberMod adds a slow, swirling modulation, and the signal shares the same ValhallaVintageVerb send as the vocal, tying both elements into the same sonic space.

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TRYING TIMES BASS SYNTH SOUND

The bass is Arturia's Mini V, a Minimoog emulation, using a preset called "Base Bass". Classic subtractive synthesis — a few oscillators stacked together through a low-pass filter, with just enough envelope movement to give each note a soft attack instead of a hard synth pluck. Download this preset on my patreon!

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And that's all! Help me continue making all this free content by supporting me on my Patreon page. Write me your feedback on YouTube too!

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