The Making of the Glitch Alpha Trailer (11 Giants)
It began with this little demo that Stewart Butterfield (stoot) sent me, which the Tiny Speck team ended up adding as the super rare SB-1 musicblock as a prank.
Stewart is a great musician. We used to play a lot together in the 90’s, which is how I ended up working with Tiny Speck. This teaser is probably the one thing I got to collaborate with Stewart the most on, and it was lots of fun.
I wanted to develop a melody, so I fired back a couple of ideas like this:
I’ve always learned from Stewart to keep thing interesting so I decided to write the song in 11/8 since it was about 11 Giants. It’s not a common division so I had to figure out how to make it sound natural. I started listening to a lot of Kopanitsa -- a Bulgarian music and dance -- where the 11 is divided like this: 2+2+3+2+2. It goes by so fast though that you can't learn it by counting, it’s more like pulses, or a feeling. I tried but I couldn't make it work.
Here’s one of the first sketches I did in eleven. It’s pretty square and didn’t move as well as the final version.
Then my friend and Saturday Saints bandmate, Kristin Cavoukian, reminded me about the syncopation that you can hear in this famous jazz piece in 5/4 by Dave Brubeck, who loved to mess with different time signatures. That’s basically what you end up hearing in the trailer, except the 11 is divided as 5+6, so it’s kind of like you add a beat every other bar. You might be able to hear Kristin singing the doo wop stuff with me at the beginning.
We really wanted the music to move quickly with the visual changes, so I focused on finding as many different sounds as I could to introduce as the piece progressed. There were about 60 tracks in this song, (!) and that’s minus the other 30 or so that I dropped like flamenco guitars, fiddle, jaw harp, alternative vocal parts (I found a version where I was doing all the accapella stuff singing “glitch” instead of “doop”).
When Stewart sent me the lyrics, there were a couple of verses that told the back-story of glitch that we didn’t end up using for the teaser. I think I was expected to change them or use them as a starting point, but I couldn’t come up with anything better.
I had this idea to get my friend Kim Sedore to sing the song. You might get a kick out of listening to some of the music that she writes. She's got a unique voice and it's great for story telling. When I sent this version to the team with her singing, it was decided that she should be the official narrator of all things Glitch.
You can hear another verse in this timing reference that wasn’t included in the final version:
I needed to get a bunch of people to sing the chorus in the end that helped express that got the idea across that we were all in this together. My friend Kristine Schmitt was having a birthday concert in my neighborhood, and I knew I was going to know everybody there, so I asked if she would me mind forming a choir after the show. It was the end of the night and there were a lot of drinks being had and it’s not normal to sing in 11/8, so it was a bit like wrangling cats, but we got it done! Most everybody there had never heard of Glitch, and after singing the chorus over and over again, people were joking that they felt like they were unwittingly participating in some secret cult.
It took a couple stabs to get the part where we introduce the giants right. You can hear in these versions that I was initially planning on doing the whole first section with just the doo wop section doing the back-up:
I think I knew all along that it needed to be Jed Clampet styles, so it was perfect that my friend Jesse Corrigan who was doing the piano part at the end had a perfect super-low voice for the part.
Jesse did a great job of imitating a piano stride style over 11/8 which is challenging because the main character of stride style is the 2/4 feel.
The saxaphone part is played by a Shimon Diamond I first met as a bluegrass guitar player, but turned out to be a smoking horn player as well.
First we came up with a horn section kind of thing and then he just improvised over it. What ended up in the teaser were just all his passes, unedited and all together. It turned out to be perfect for the chaos.
Listen to this unedited improvisation. Wish I could have used the whole thing. It’s so good. You can hear Shimon laughing in the end “I can’t think of anything else!”
Last, but not least, I have to say that one of my favourite things about this was working alongside Kristel Ottis (sugarQb), who edited the teaser and ended up as Product Manager at Tiny Speck. She had a keen sense of timing and took a lot of cues off of the music, as well as some surprising ones (my favourite is the blender at 1:14).
It’s really rewarding when someone edits well to your music, and when you get to be involved right from the storyboard stage! This song was also a great example of the rich musical community in Toronto that I was able to draw from while making music for Glitch.
It also goes without saying that working to Kukubee's art is always fun and inspiring!
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