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Student music collective to release second multi-genre album

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Legacy Productions poses for a portrait outside of Hill Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill. Photo courtesy of Kevin Parris.

Legacy Productions is a student-led music collective at UNC that provides artists a space to express themselves, form a community and learn how to take a song from an idea to a finished product. On April 25, they will release an album called “Legacy Heartbeat," the second album the club has released to date. 

The idea for Legacy came about when Taekmin Kim, the founder of the collective and a UNC class of 2023 graduate, was looking to join a club where he could work with other students to record and produce music. When he learned something like this didn’t exist, he knew he had to create it. After brainstorming for around a year and assembling a group of old and new friends, Kim officially founded Legacy. 

Legacy currently uses the studio in Hill Hall to record and meets nearby. On a normal meeting day in the studio, members usually work on vocals, compose on an instrument or just hang out. 

"You hear, 'Oh, I make music,'" former president and UNC graduate Trey Thurman said. "Most people think, 'Oh, like, SoundCloud rapper, it's not gonna be anything good,' and already have that stigma. So, I think people have good ideas in their head, but they just don't know how to actually get it, because they don't have the resources. [They don't have] the crew around, so we're trying to bridge that gap because everybody has a great part to play." 

The process starts with recording, where everyone lays down their parts. Then comes editing — cleaning up the recordings, aligning everything and removing unwanted sections.

Erin Flanagan, a junior environmental science major, said she spent approximately 15 hours getting her song, "Eden," right, from composing on her guitar for a few days, recording the vocals a couple measures at a time and working on harmonies. 

“It’s a labor of love, but it is a lot of time,” Flanagan said.

Next is mixing, the most detailed step, where everything is balanced and the song is polished. Finally, the track goes to mastering, where it's finalized to sound good across all listening platforms. 

Kevin Parris, the current Legacy president and UNC junior, mixed and engineered all the songs on the upcoming album. 

“He’s the mitochondria," Kaylee Barnette said, laughing.

"The powerhouse, the heartbeat," Ryan Grafenberg interjected.

Parris started as a member, going to Legacy after classes to be part of a friend group that was formed around making music. Over time, he began to take music more seriously and used the club to hone his skills in engineering and production, which he said he wants to pursue in the future. Because this year’s album is so diverse, and his background is electronic and hip-hop, Parris had to do a lot of research and learn how to execute songs in folk, country and rock. 

“[Legacy] is going to really help students and give them a great door to go into with professional work leaving Carolina,” Pablo Vega, a teaching assistant professor in the music department and Legacy’s advisor, said. “And even for the people that don't want to do [music] professionally, it's just a really cool hobby to have.” 

Legacy Production's upcoming album is a multi-genre collection of this school year's work. It features songs ranging from folk to dance music and rock to country. Kim said from the club’s inception, the idea was for artists wanting to make music in any genre to be welcome. 

The album shows how diverse the artists in Legacy are. "Eden" is a deep, bluesy track, with powerful vocals. "Flawless" is a high energy EDM track. "Fajkat" is a soothing and simple song written in Wolof, an African language that the artist, Booth Bassett, is learning at UNC. 

“I think [each album] just shows how the culture of UNC [is] shifting, but it's like a time capsule within each album, every year, of the culture of UNC and its music creatives,” Kim said

@dthlifestyle | lifestyle@dailytarheel.com

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