#TheLastofUs episode 4 tonight. I’m a crack whore.
“#HerDad” is inspired by my #highschool girlfriend’s dad, who adamantly disapproved of me because I wasn’t a #Presbyterian. Some of you have probably experienced something similar, i.e. hostility from your girlfriend’s / boyfriend’s parents for reasons involving their religion. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, you might know someone who has. I can talk about it nonchalantly today, but it was an ordeal back then, because I was in love with her.
“Her Dad” was intended to be song 90, but after about four days of mixing, I was having enough difficulty producing a chorus for the song that I decided to set it on the back burner and shift my attention to “Rich & Crazy,” which had pop-punk melodies that I was craving to work on.
It was difficult mustering the motivation to refocus on “Her Dad,” because it wasn’t the direction I wanted to take. But hell, it was 80% done, so I reopened the old Logic Pro file and finished the final 20% a few months after it was set on the back burner.
After spending a few days recording two or three new chorus ideas, I opted to copy, paste and rearrange the “her dad is nice, her mom is a hottie” vocals from the 1st verse to create a new chorus. Total cop out, but I really like the way it sounds. That’s one of the biggest benefits of DAWs, the ease in splicing together different recordings to create something new. Something similar happened with “Face Tattoo (Song 93),” where vocals from the verses were manipulated to create the song‘s chorus.
I was introduced to the source material for The Last of Us while mixing vocals for “Hannah (Song 89)” back in July, 2020, by watching @thaRadBrad playthrough both games. Needless to say, my mind was blown. With “Her Dad” originally being song 90, and being developed directly after “Hannah,” my newfound obsession with The Last of Us resulted in me watching tons of lore and playthrough videos while mixing “Her Dad.”
While mixing songs, something entertaining is always playing in the background for extra brain stimulation, whether that be a movie, tv series, a video game play through, podcast, etc. Anything but music, because I can’t mix music while listening to other music (explained in post 87).
Beat + bass + melody. That’s the style of GoBoy 5. While I’ve appreciated this minimalistic style for years, “Tell My Mama (Song 42)” was the first time trying it. I went whole-hog with GoBoy 5, in which most songs primarily consist of a beat, bass and melody (excerpt from post 80).
For GoBoy 5, instead of creating for the sake of creating, like I did for GoBoy 4, I wanted to make poppier songs that would appeal to a larger audience. Was that goal accomplished? Well, maybe, I guess. It resulted in the song “In Love (Song 82),” which everyone and their mother seems to like (excerpt from post 79).
GoBoy 5 ragdolled me. I remember wondering if I’d live to see the completion of the album. While the style is minimalistic, the writing and production processes were chaotic, akin to throwing darts with a blindfold on. Most songs turned into a puzzle once they reached the mixing phase, with a portion of the pieces being destined not to fit. It required constant compromising - discarding segments, restructuring, rewriting, etc. The combination of the difficult production process and temporary chaos at work left a blood-soaked trail behind me (excerpt from post 80).
In April, 2021, almost all of GoBoy 3, 4 and 5‘s songs were restructured to be under 3 minutes (preferably under 2m 30s), including this song. I became okay with releasing songs around the 2 min mark after realizing The Beatles and The Beach Boys had some songs around that length. In an attempt to increase replay value in this streaming era, most of GoBoy’s songs are now purposely around 2m 20s (excerpts from post 37).
A bass boost was added to songs 37-99 in Nov, 2021, while I was stuck at home with covid. As a result, this song feels more powerful. The bass boost isn’t a simple plugin nonchalantly added to each song. It’s a process that took about 3.5 hours per song, or one whole month to complete all songs. Admittedly, I pushed the bass boost a little too far for some of them. The bass in some songs sounds like a freaking earthquake (unnecessarily pronounced low frequencies 20 - 50 Hz). Might dial that back someday. The bass boost was also applied to every song on GoBoy 6 and beyond (excerpt from post 37).
