John Oates, Berklee Students Write and Record “Smoke And Mirrors,” Offer Song And Stems Free
This piece examines the creation of a new song recorded by multi-platinum songwriter John Hall and a crew of Berklee College of Music students, before later being released free to the public.
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Guest post via Music Marketing Review
Multi-platinum Songwriters and Rock Hall of Fame inductee John Oates (Hall & Oates) co-wrote and recorded a new pop song live on stage in two hours with a crew of students from Berklee College of Music recently as a collaborative experiment. Vocals and keyboard were later added at The Record Company, a Boston-based non-profit studio, where the song was also mixed and mastered.
The documentary-style video was premiered by Billboard calling the song “…a thoroughly coherent and impressively alluring mid-tempo soul-pop ballad.”
By releasing the song royalty-free in the public domain, Oates and team welcome anyone interested to remix the song and upload to YouTube or Soundcloud using #smokeandmirrorsremix in the title so a master playlist can be compiled.
Oates detailed, “Pop songwriting today is largely done by committee. We had two writers on beats, two on chords, two on melody, and two on lyrics. Each duo had a laptop, midi controller, and headphones, and sent their .wav files to a cloud service. The files were downloaded to the engineer’s master laptop running ProTools and mixed on the fly so everyone could hear each other. It worked remarkably well.”
The free track and stems for remixing can be downloaded at Music Marketing Review.
