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.