After getting out all my feelings with the "Letter to fans" I can restart a new cycle now. This is the first song of this one. I invited Dan to make some music taking advantage of that he came from London for holidays. You know him. He's been my musical partner so many times, and always getting great results. I've been working in some ideas these days and everything's flowing. I can say that I am again motivated to make music and becoming addicted to mixing and tracking.
It's curious
how the song was developing from a starting idea, which is the background guitar
at the end of the song. Dan was playing it just messing around with the guitar.
We decided to record it in a loop and see what this would take us to, and we
witnessed the creative process of the song. Firstly we stacked a piano phrase
on it, we added a marimba to it, then a drum groove that I played, then a bass
line and we got a good "trip-hop" track to work with. I didn't want
to work on lyrics now, it'd take a lot of time and I preferred to take
advantage of Dan's visit so I came with this idea of distorting the voice a lot
so the voice wouldn't be intelligible. To explain this to him I covered my
mouth with my hand, pegged my nose and started to rap without saying anything,
this brought us the idea of making it sound like a megaphone. So we recorded my
voice and worked on getting that specific sound. We also spent some time
playing with effects and artefacts until the point we got addicted to it and
couldn't stop. He also sung some improvised lines, which would be carefully
selected later at the edition stage to take the best from the song.
Miking
I only used
mics for voice and guitar. My Rhode NT-1 for both of them. We recorded many
takes of the guitar sound just moving the mic some centimetres from the speaker
each time til we found a one that sounded nice.
Mixing
One of the
things that I'm not very used to yet is to aim for a particular kind of sound.
Generally speaking yeah, but when going to individual instruments is very
difficult to me. This gets more frustrating when I'm working with drums, which
is my instrument, and I don't know what kind of sound would fit well with the
song. I've spent so much time working on grooving and dynamics and technique
and how to make the kit sound as I love (very full, round and a bit flappy) in
all these years but I haven't been enough aware of how to create different
sounds for different kinds of music, so this is something that I'm going to work
harder from now on.
I mixed it
taking a lot of the ideas that Dan gave to me in the pre-mix. We discover some
cool plugins, like Morphoder by Waves, which is a very funny vocoder, it's
perceptible on your left speaker if you pay attention carefully, it's almost
like a cacophony following the voices speech. We used the Rotor Cabinet from
Logic on drums (I remove a lot amount of it for the mix cause I didn't find a
way to make it sound cool). We also used a pitch shifter to put an extra voice
track an octave below, this became an important piece of the song as we let
this voice to show up leading the song.
Finally I think I did a lot of great job with equalization, finding
spaces for all the instruments, as well the effects on the background guitar is
very cool, I spent a lot of time breaking my brain to get something usable as
it sounded to harsh and annoying.
Wrap-Up
This song
has taught me a lot of the flow work and how working with other creative people
can lead you to places that you wouldn't imaging to would go towards. It's a
good feeling, just to go to somewhere that alone would be impossible, it's like
getting out of your house getting in a friend's one and tour it trying to
understand how's his life in it and why he does place certain things in
specific spots, which make you think about himself as individual and how different
is his mind than yours.
Enjoy it!
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