How do You™ Get By?

[You™]

Thanks. There is a guitar track played by my partner. This song started out quite different. When we recorded it last Saturday, it was more of a strummy guitar, piano and drums affair. But as I was fooling around with the arrangement late at night, I stumbled upon this (to me at least) interesting groove by using loops of a sustained guitar note and a heavily effected rework of the keyboard part (that becomes the regular repeating "whoomph" sound that starts the whole thing off). Then I added more!

The main drums are created from a "real" track I saved from a remix project combined with FL embellishing (Bigger BD and snare reinforcement). There is also some downsampled HH/shakers and the aforementioned cowbell/percussion track that also employs a few custom synth patches I made. I'm not very good with pure synthesis stuff. I tend to mix a lot of natural elements and play it live as much as possible. I'm trying to stake-out the "whole-grain organic electronica" genre.

[shamann]

Stragely, I liked the drums (or the whole percussion schmear) the best. Enjoyed this one, You.

[SecondSkin]

First, I love the feel of this track right from the start -- deep, dark and haunting -- the intro is perfect. I agree with the others on one thing -- the vocals need to come up a bit. Love the contrast of the "video game" sound with the rest of the track. The drumloop becomes a bit weary after a while, especially during the vocal sections -- I'd like to hear some short glitches or stops to accent certain lyrical phrases (like "making plans for bigger things") words.

Anyway, it sounds like a great start to a track that's not quite complete yet. I'd love to hear it with a chorus or b-section, which is odd becuase I don't usually care for V-C-V-C-B-C arrangement.

[You™]

Cheers shamann asn SecondSkin. I like the idea of breaking up the tracks and changing some of the parts around. I think I will do that when I get around to remixing this. I should at least try to sing the vocals better especially if they're going to get more prominent! I think I've got all the elements I need here - I just need to carve something nice out of it.

As far as the V-C-V... sequencing goes, I've said on other occasions that - in general - I'm trying to move away from that. But I still enjoy using the formula once in a while. Part of the way I approach composing and mixing is that each section of music and each instrument has equal importance to the whole song. There isn't always a top-down hierarchy. Instead, each element is a modular node which exchanges focus with the other nodes at different intervals. Sometimes there's a busy scrum of overlapping patterns and figures and sometimes there's a coordinated effort to restrain the din so that a certain idea will be more obvious. I think of music more in terms of pattern, symmetry and mood than some others. In this case, I have 8 verses. The last four are almost a mirror of the first four (I don't strive for perfect symmetry) separated by a lot of freeform hacked-percussion jamming. It's probably important that (at least some of) the lyric stand out more to reinforce that tension, but I am not sure if I can conjure a proper chorus for this song. I'll see what I can do though...

[SecondSkin]

I don't know that I'd expect a real chorus here -- just something else to break up the track -- a key change or something. I heard once that Massive Attack liked to combine elements of different tracks into one song, so they didn't have the A-B-A structure but still had alot of different parts to the track. Anyways, I always liked that kind of thing and this sounds like the kind of track you could do that with.

Mark

[mr.me]

I like the sounds in here, you've got it sounding big as hell too...cool you got some vox in it!

Nice mix, I like!

[One]

I enjoyed your track. I like your vocals and agree with the rest that they should be more up front.

[toine6]

Nice Song. And am saying that after having just got home 30 minutes ago from the Skinny Puppy concert.

[You™]

Thanks for the feedback, you all... When I have a chance I will remix this with all your comments in mind.


@ toine6: I'm surprised you can hear anything after a Skinny Puppy concert! I really must have over-compressed this!

[edit: oops!]

[astanine]

nothing constructive to say, just i like it

[You™]

nothing constructive to say, just i like it

That's good enough for me!

[Lunch Money]

I'm not entirely convinced that the vocals are too 'quiet', but more that they're sharing too many frequencies with other instruments. They need their own space, with a different EQ curve and perhaps a reverb or delay that allows high pass.

Great tune, though! I DO like the acoustic-ish drum sound, and I think the blending of the two was successfully done.

Cheers!
Greg

[toine6]

@ toine6: I'm surprised you can hear anything after a Skinny Puppy concert! I really must have over-compressed this!

Ear plugs baby. Otherwise I'd be saying, you need to turn down all them ringinginging frequencies in your tune.

[mystahr]

For some reason it took a few days of listening to reply. Either a nasty noise in my system or not having the right ears prevented me before.

Anyhow; I quite enjoyed this track George for one.

What I think the stronghold of this track is the playfull percussive sounds. Yet I also feel that it is snowed under by the heavy instrumented track. Especially round 3 mins I feel there is just too much going on making the listen just too dense.

A suggestion would be to just cut some of the tracks and see how that works.

What I do need to say is that I love the vocals; especially the chorus seems to be stuck in my head now.

[You™]

Thanks for those ideas and comments Lunch Money, toine6 and Mystahr...

I'm finally back from NYC (man, there's a lot of crowds there) and will give it another go when I have time. I usually EQ out the bottom end of my voice but this time I didn't for some reason - I'll check that and I have some ideas about thinning the mix too. I just listenend to Plunge's incredible track and am feeling unworthy...