Apr 7, 2019
(Neon Vice)
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(Neon Vice)
(Neon Vice)
Music: Retro 80's Artist Magic Dance's Kiss Scene EP
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2093700933/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=small/transparent=true/
Dubrovnik, July 2011
I Wish My Car Was A Transformer by Opus Science Collective NeonVice has asked us to write a piece about our latest EP I Wish My Car Was A Transformer with an emphasis on our approach to arrangement. We’re of the opinion that arrangement is 75% of the production process and that if you get your arrangement right the track will largely produce itself. As producers and sound engineers our canvas is the range of human hearing (20Hz to 20KHz), and how we make use of this is key. Don’t think about instruments, but rather think in terms of textures and where sounds lie in the frequency spectrum. You want to leave space somewhere in the frequency spectrum in your music’s downtime and then aim to fill the frequency spectrum when stuff’s pounding in the climactic moments of your music. But in doing so ask yourself what feelings do muffled sounds conjure, what do bright, crisp sounds do to a mix, and how’s best to transition between different frequencies in support of dynamic changes? With that in mind let’s look at the title track of the EP “I Wish My Car Was A Transformer”. It begins with space. The kick drum is firmly routed in the bottom, but notice there’s a high frequency bite to the kick sample we’ve chosen so it cuts through the mix and gains presence. We’ve side-chained a number of things in the mix against the kick to help it pump harder throughout the whole track (we pretty much do this on everything we make). Here you can see several pads, bass and the kick. There’s also a sequenced synth. That might seem like a lot for a sparse intro, but let’s look closer: The pads chords are relatively far apart and no waveform is constant or large. Tonally, the synth chords are bright, leaving space in the lower mid range. Space that will inevitably be filled when the track fully kicks in. Short staccato stabs allow the reverb to do its thing and make for a large open-feeling acoustic environment. The automation you can see is mostly low-pass filtering EQ. We’ve filters on the bass, some of the pads and the sequenced synth all rolling off the top end. During the first eight bars, these filters are automated to open up bringing more top end into the tone of each part. A white noise sweep (from low to high) is placed in the build up to bar 19. We also pulled out the bass in this bar to make things thin out just before it all kicks in in full. When the 19th bar drops, we include claps, a shaker, and a bass bomb, which combined with brighter bass and synth tones has a more euphoric feel. We let that groove play out until the 27th bar when the song properly gets going. From this point it’s simply a matter of bringing things in and removing things to keep the dynamics varied and fresh. There’s almost no limit to how much you should play with dynamics, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the music. Make sure you give over sufficient time for the listener to simply enjoy the groove. In this image you can see the full arrangement of the piece and even if you’d never heard it, you could follow the general sequence of the music, simply by looking at what comes in and goes away at different points. There are times when the claps are in to support the snare, other times they’re not. The kick is pretty constant, but the snare and hi hat drop out at times. The tomes (in purple) white noise rise and falls (in white) and bass bombs (the small brown regions) generally work together. The clave and agogo come and go, as does the sequenced synth, but the pads and melodies are more formulaic. Further to arrangement, after the first time round the verse and chorus you’ll hear we pull the filters down on some of the sounds and strip the song down similar to the intro and open the filters up for the second verse. The next time we strip the filters back; we introduce a bright, breathy tone playing the melody. This is different from what the listener’s heard before that point and means there’s a lot of space in the mix. So when the next build happens and the next chorus arrives, the dynamic change is very significant, but it wasn’t a simple repeat of what went before it, it keeps the variety coming. You’ll notice that at the start of the synth solo section (bar 107), we take everything out for the first beat of the first bar in that section. Little tricks like this are very simple to do but have a massive dynamic impact. So too is dropping a beat on an odd number of bars. People expect rounds and multiples of four. Do something significant on the third or fifth bar. Catch the listener off guard, they love it! Towards the end of the solo, we pull a few things out of the mix and have the bass running up the notes of the scale and put the snare on all four beats of the bar. This is an old Motown trick and works wonders for pushing things along and building tension. Moving from a loud, intense section to a low-key section (like we do after the final chorus) is always made easier if you can handle the transition with something that runs over the transition. White noise sweeps, automated delay tales or some other embellishments are worth putting in these sections. This stops things feeling too blunt or sudden when you remove a load of stuff from the mix. Finally the outro is almost a mirror of the intro. We slowly roll the filters down so everything goes deep and moody and then rapidly open the filters up so it feels like it’s building for a final time round the main hook of the song, but then stop things dead. This leaves the song hanging in the ear of the listener and can encourage multiple listening as it makes the listener want to hear the next section again. The above mentioned techniques pretty much apply universally throughout a lot of what we do, so we’ll focus on different techniques employed in the rest of the EP. Like “Transformer”, the second track of the EP, “Rachel”, uses filter sweeps, side chaining, white noise sweeps, reverse sweeps, arpeggio synth lines with filters and subtle increases in instrumentation with each verse and chorus. The mid section strips right down to an ambient pad and a very DX7 sounding electric piano. You’ll hear the above techniques deployed on the build into things dropping with the full beat and solo. We honestly don’t do anything in Rachel we didn’t do in Transformer. It’s actually a simpler song with regards to production. One thing to note however that we haven’t yet mentioned is never under estimate the effectiveness of a shaker. Simply adding a shaker line can bring heaps of movement to a track. Try it! Another trick is when side chaining, use the auxiliaries to take the kick drum signal pre-fader. Then loop your kick drum for the whole of your track or where desired and then use volume automation to bring it in and out. The kick drum won’t be audible but it will still be playing and sending to your sidechaing compression, creating the modulating compression on your synths and bass, and thus keeping the pumping going even though the solid low end isn’t there. Moving on to the third track on the EP, “LSP” takes things in a different direction. This song is a massive tongue in cheek pastiche of the 80s stadium ballad. There’s tons of space in the mix on this one helped greatly by the enormous reverb on the snare. The bass, minimal drums with massive reverbs, glossy, bright electric piano and so on are all characteristic of this style of music. The bass was played in live, semi improvised and is never a note for note repeat in any section. This helps towards subtly giving the song variety and a live feel (something electronic music genres can sometimes lack). The chorus have vocoded backing vocals made thin and bright with tons of reverb and additional bright poly synths to bring an extra layer of upper mid-range sparkle. It remains sparse and full of space until the ripping synth guitar solo, which is a tone so thick it completely fills the dynamic range. We put in some really gritty saw tooth synths playing long low notes under the synth guitar to add an extra high frequency sizzle. You will hear many people doing this sort of thing. That thick, high buzzy quality can bring intensity and warm texture, and it is present in many genres. Keeping things Synthwave, go listen to any pumping Mitch Murder track (he’s our favourite Synthwave producer) and spot the super high buzzy quality most likely from the high harmonics of a saw tooth, or even filtered white noise. Also, notice before we drop the synth guitar solo, we hang on an extra bar’s gap to what you might expect. This is another little arrangement trick to keep the listener on their toes. We also muck about with some Tremolo automation on one of the pads here. The fourth track, “Proto Call” is largely built around an 8-bit chiptune synth pad that largely fills the mid range, has a thick bottom end and a high-end buzz. Check out this frequency response! It basically eats up the frequency spectrum leaving you having to place sound very specifically. As the one synth tone is doing most of the work on this one we made the melody minimalist and staccato in nature. Not only does it make it easier to mix this way, but it also sounds cool and interesting to have a single thick sound with stabbing, short notes flittering around it. Anything longer in note or thicker in texture would be competing for space and harder to mix. We rely heavily on percussive movement on this one. Shakers and other percussive embellishments bring significant dynamic changes. We also put a key change in half way through to simply lift everything and make the track feel like it’s going somewhere new. Key changes can often be cheesy, but at the same time, we love them as they’re great for changing the feel of a song without really having to do a whole lot. Again we used the missed beat trick on the first beat after the phone call section (like prior to the solo in Transformer). As the tune builds to crescendo, more layers are added and a double chorus added. Extra noises and pitch bending on synths is everywhere in the final chorus and then we strip the track down to its bare components. We leave the groove ticking over without the bass for a while as it made for a nice groove. We layer things gradually as if we’re going for another run through the main chorus, and then stop everything suddenly. Like “Transformer”, we did this to leave the listener hanging, wanting more. The final track “ディスコテック”, like the others on this EP uses many filter sweeps and plays with dynamics, bringing things in and removing things. One of the main things with this track is we give over a lot more time to simply letting the groove just sit and do its thing. It’s very House in that regard. It’s fairly minimal and simple. You’ll hear the use of shakers, white noise sweeps and filters a plenty on the builds to make transitions impactful. In the final chorus, we bring extra synths in that have bright, high frequencies to dance around in the upper regions of the frequency spectrum, an area we leave quite empty for the majority of this track. To sum up, we don’t do anything especially different or unusual. Obviously our instrumentation and choice of sounds sits us wholly in the electronic music genres, but the principles that underpin our arrangement and production can be heard in everything from Michael Jackson to Tom Waits to the Yellow Magic Orchestra. There’s a finite space in which to work as far as frequency and dynamics go, so we simply work within these to continually keep songs moving in interesting directions. We don’t spend too long in any one place and do little things to catch the listener off guard from time to time. We choose sounds that are right for what you want. We don’t make do and spend hours shaping a sound with EQ and other effects. We take the time to shape our synth tones from the offset, and then we only need to use subtle complimentary EQ and compression. Our mixer pages are pretty minimal as a result: We side chain our kick drum into the compressors on our bass and lower mid-range pads to help keep the bottom end solid. We always make sure we use the right kind of reverbs too as reverb misuse is what often shows up a track for being unrefined or amateur as far as production goes (too much, too little, wrong sounding reverb for the style of music etc – this is an area you absolutely must get right and something we often hear when browsing self produced music on the Internet). We tend to reach for large plate convolution reverbs with a fairly thin body as that suits our style, especially the 80s sounding stuff. The other key thing is to always listen to a wide variety of music with an analytical ear. We’re always asking ourselves: What would Chromeo do here? What would Mitch Murder do with this transition? What would Fleetwood Mac do with this chord change? And so on… Stay objective, stay imaginative and make sure there’s plenty of variation but that you never get away from the vibe of the music. Don’t do things for the sake of doing them, but do things to keep the listener engaged with the music and ultimately make them want to come back and listen again. We hope this article has provided a little insight into how we go about things and been of some interest and/or help to you.
Neon Vice asked us to write an article about our approach to arrangement. Check it out: http://www.neonvice.com/news//production-opus-science-collective-shares-their-arrangement-techniques
Check it out! The guys over at neonvice.com had a chat with me about my EP!
Interface made it on to Neon Vice! Go check out neonvice.com for tons of independent Synthwave/Outrun/Chiptune music and more!
Had the awesome opportunity to be interviewed by neonvice. Check out the interview to learn a bit more about my art, process and inspiration among other things.