Sorry to all those that thought (as I also did) that this project was going to be a solid 7 days. Life gets in the way!
During the break away from this project I went down to Brighton for a couple of days to eat ice cream and hunt for records. If anyone’s into record diving, go to ‘Snoopers Paradise’ in Brighton. Not just for the records; it’s like a giant indoor car boot but if all the stuff in the car boot was stuff you want . . . So much stuff.
Also, I performed with the Scratch Orchestra in Canterbury, playing experimental music. That was all fun. There should be a video of that performance soon, so when I get sent a link, I’ll post it up on here.
(ooo, looks experimental!) - Thanks to Lorraine Bruce for the photos.
I also managed to write a poem two days ago which I might use in a song in the future, but it would be separate from the ‘7 days of sounds’ thing due to it being written outside the time frame of the seven days. I WILL NOT CHEAT! ...yes. Yet as the people that follow this blog would probably like it, I thought I would post the poem.
Will we get to Yangtze River?
Brown broken homes on the side where we roam,
Alone,
It feels like,
All it feels like,
Until we float, right?
Into the perfect star blazed and hazed night.
Will we get to Yangtze River?
Red beams stay Red forever,
End of my tether,
Take off hell bent and leather,
Will this ever,
Be as fruitful and to the letter,
Brush stroke tremor can’t ruin the dream that I’ve seen.
Oh, I got to Yangtze River.
Only in it’s mirror do I figure,
That laughter and love can’t come from this enough to make me cry as hard as ever,
To lay down sorrow and borrow a laugh just to share it and share it’s past.
It’s love that I seek,
Totality is bleak,
I cannot don a beak,
Yet I can lay down and bask in the fruits of love while life lasts.
I wrote this poem after seeing the last episode of Louie. If you haven’t seen Louie yet I IMPLORE you to watch it. Especially if you are in to serialism (which I’m not) or serialist comedy (which it turns out, I am very much). The last three episodes before the one which inspired the poem featured David Lynch. Yeah, that’s right. Go see it now.
Just a reminder; I will be doing this tomorrow for the 6th day and then Sunday for the 7th day . . . just like god. Although I will not rest. Because I am better than him/her/that.
Day 5 brings a new track + revisions to other tracks/sounds/stuff. It turns out I did quite a bit of work, so I will guide you through the sounds gently. If you don’t want to listen to all the sounds and NEED that music now, do yourself a little scroll until you find
and just above that will be the track. But for those of you that like the suspense, let us continue.
First off, I started by sampling records again. The first record being a comedic 12” 45RPM single by the character from The Young Ones, Neil.
I originally bought this for a friend because he was into TYOs at the time, but then he took off to Australia, so I have it in my possession. I listened to it anyway and it was kind of amusing. The joke of the stoner gets old for me though. However, there is one point in the music where there is a loud piano chord that just carries on and modifies itself into another sound. It’s a pretty cool sound.
...yeah. But still - the sound itself is really cool. I probably should mention that I am now sampling through my amplifier instead of straight from the preamp now and it sounds a lot better. Here is my beautiful little amplifier. £2.50 at a car boot!
I recorded this sound in 33 1/3rd instead of 45 to make it sound lower in pitch. It’s probably not that big of a deal anyway, since I used a pitch shift on it anyway to match my next sample froooom ...
Black Blood. I found this 7” on Sunday and fell in love with the band. Funky French speaking afrobeat band from the 70’s. It’s so so good.
I sampled the track ‘A.I.E. (A Mwana)’. Here is said band miming said track:
Damn that’s good miming . . .
I sampled this for two sounds. One, that funky ass beat. Two, that powerful vocal lick.
I took the beat and slowed it down to half time.
Then I compressed it, EQed it etc. I cut up and used the ‘Neil’ sample as backing atmosphere. It becomes more prominent through processing later in the piece though.
I then played around with adding a bass sound. People who like the stuff I have done in the past may not like this part of the track. The bass has a wonky sound on its attack. I put it there originally just to lay down a bass track with the idea that I was going to change it. Eventually, though, I gave in and admitted my love for this bass sound. Here is the wonky bass sound.
The bass sound was created with an EFM1 synthesiser that is standard in Logic. I then messed with the attack and voila.
So with the drum sound, atmosphere and the wonky bass, here is one loop all together.
I then used the vocal lick to introduce the track like so.
I wanted to have BV’s but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I played around and came up with this.
Mixed around with them, pitch shifted, compressed etc.
Although it doesn’t sound great after all the processing, within the body of the other tracks, it fits in while still sounding gritty. Here it is in context.
After laying this down as a basis, I started writing lyrics. I had the words ‘Come Down’ in my mind and based the concept of the track around this.
We’ve seen this all before,
The Come Down,
The Come Down.
Take a pic and loose your mind,
It’s happening again.
We thought we’d learn from history,
How it all could be.
Strips of malls,
Standing tall,
There’s no space to Come Down.
Under flowers lays the mud.
I guess the concept or point of this song is loosely based on the future, looking back on our past’s mistakes and refusing to learn from them. Loosely about materialism, I feel we could look back on our life and wonder why we collectively choose to build malls upon malls upon malls. I guess this is more about the states, but it’s pretty evident in England. It hit me when I was watching one of George Carlin's famous rants. You can view it here.
I also took inspiration from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl which you can read here. The second part of the poem, where Ginsberg talks about ‘Moloch’ is the inspiration behind a lot of the meaning to this track.
In between the lyrics ‘There’s no space to Come Down’ and ‘Under flowers lays the mud’, I created some reasonably complex production. Those who don’t wish to read this blog for technical stuff might as well skip the blurb here and go straight and have a listen to the sound.
I took the sound from the ‘Neil’ track, and automated into a bus. Within that bus, I layed down a pitch shift, distortion and compression. This bus (or AUX) channel was then sent to a reverb. I also made it so that the bus was set to ‘Latch’ automation in Logic. This means that, when you play the piece and you move a variable within that bus, automation will be mapped automatically. It means you can record in movements or changes of sound rather than having to manually draw the information in. So, I took hold of the pitch control plugin and recorded in a movement going back and forth up the register (it goes up to 2,400 cents of change either end of the pitch spectrum). With the distortion in the chain, it sounded like some sort of revving of an engine that I loved. The last part of the automation was written in, so that the pitch scale increased massively until it hit another sample. If anyone wants more information on this process or doesn’t quite understand something, then hit me up with a PM. I will be more than happy to explain.
During the ‘Under flowers lays the mud’ section I added extra delay that wasn’t on the vocals previously. There is also That sounds like this.
Underneath this section there is a small amount of production done on the vocal sample from Black Blood to accent every 2nd and 4th beat of the bar. Here is that sound stripped down to the drums and sample.
After the vocal section I then played at remixing some of the samples and vocals that have happened previously in the track, building up different textures to that of before.
On the last of the remix section I sing ‘The Come Down’ one more time. During this point I have used more automation so that the pitch drops off at the end. Like everything has suddenly collapsed apart from itself. I’m not completely sure if I’ll leave this in, as I don’t know if I like it. I would post the part individually, but since it’s the last thing in the track, I’ll just post the whole song.
So here it is. This track is called ‘Come Down’. As I with all of my tracks, I recommend it at loud.
So I decided to leave Come Down for another night to mix as I didn’t see much more I could do with it. I moved on by looking back at my other pieces. I looked mainly at the ones that I did on day 1, Bleeding Light and The Devil. I started with the latter, had a listen, and my first thought was that the second section where there are no lyrics, but there are backing vocals, sounded quite boring. There was a massive space for development of the drum samples. This is the section I’m talking about.
I wanted to see what I could do by processing the original drum samples and perhaps making this section faster by creating more movement. Obvious inspiration for this is the work of DJ Dangermouse (which made him famous in fact). Here’s an example of drum play that became synonymous with the work of DM on the Grey Album.
For those that don’t know, DM mixed Jay-Z’s Black album with the Beatle’s White album. Both huge albums in their respective genres. The ultimate mashup album.
So, with out getting to complex, I created different versions of the drums, shortened them so they started at different points, placed them about (like on a canvas) and mixed them so that panning was prominent variable in the sound.
Here’s a picture of the panning automation.
I may do more on this, make it even more detailed, but for now it’s Ok. Here is the drums soloed.
After creating the drums movement, I felt that there wasn’t enough movement in the backing vocals themselves. So, much like the process I took in ‘Come Down’, I created pitch movement, but this time with drawn in automation. This is the result with the drums and BVs soloed. The movement of the pitch is subtle; a bit like overtone singing.
So here is the result of the processing of drums of that section in it’s completion.
I feel this sound works a lot better as it creates a new section for the piece rather than the same beat we have heard before this section.
I also worked on the vocals a little bit but didn’t modify them too much, I just mixed them into the track.
With regards to ‘Bleeding Light’, I managed to re-record the vocals with a better mic, which turned out well.
So, like I said, there will be one of these tomorrow and then one on Sunday to finish off! I am enjoying doing these and after this project is through I think I will update this blog as a regular audio blog where I can share sounds that I love and give explanations of how I create my music.
I’ll leave with a couple of pictures that I took of Margate today. It is SO foggy here!
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