Saturday, April 19, 2008

645 Spacetime

Nonsensical title aside, 645 Spacetime is probably the most serious, initimate song on the album. It starts off with me doing my best impression (it has fooled many) of a lady singing a reverby, angelic "aah." While that is fading out, the guitar, kick drum and cymbals fade in. The whole first verse and chorus and post-chorus are like this, until the second verse when everything kinda bursts in (including strings). Then during the last chorus everything fades out except for the lead vocals and the lead guitar, and following it's last strum are the oohs and aahs from Sleep, leading directly into that song.
I used a ton of reverb in this mix, but not really big expansive stuff, I just wanted it to feel like you were listening to it in a big, dark room. Once the full instrumentation is in, the vocals are drowned out, just barely peeking through. I don't know why I like it that way, but to me it makes it more ethereal and dreamy, because you can hear the vocals but you aren't exactly sure what's being said.
Overall I think it's a nice laid0back song before the noisier finale tracks.

Friday, April 18, 2008

For a Time

Today I mixed a few of the songs that I recorded with Moostache a couple of weeks ago.
In addition, I worked on For a Time. It starts out with a fade in of crickets chirping and night time sounds. I always imagined those in the song because to me the songs sounds like it was recorded at night. The songs is "lead" by the acoustic guitar, but the real attraction here is the bass. Chris took my idea and ran with it, making one of the bast bass lines on the whole album. It fits the song so perfectly it's like it was always there, or that I wrote the song around it.
It's a pretty straightforward arrangement, with various guitars and strings coming in for one verse only, something I don't do on any other song. My favorite are the double tracked electric guitars that come in the third verse, because they sound so unsure, like they might go away at any minute (one last fun fact: I broke my pick in the beginning of the acoustic track but kept playing. Listen close and you might hear it).
I also started 645 Spacetime, but I'll post about that tomorrow when I work on that as well as some Farewell to Ernest songs.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Doesn't Matter, What Could I Be, Instrumental, Asteroid

So, a few weeks ago I started mixing What Could I Be and Doesn't Matter, but I never got around to posting about them. They are both a great deal of fun to work with and listen to. Doesn't Matter is a pretty straight forward rock song. We have double tracked rhythm guitars, double tracked lead and intro guitars, double tracked vocals, a synth, bass, solo guitar, strings and drums. The big challenge here is that everything is double tracked and fighting each other for space (I usually do doubled tracking the old fashioned way and hard pan everything left and right). What Could I Be offered a more interesting challenge. During the choruses, the strings and flutes and clarinets kinda drown out the vocals. I had a tough time just EQing them and adjusting the volume, teetering back and forth between overpowering and buried in the mix. Kinda frustrating, but it was worth and is probably my favorite song so far.
The Instrumental (no name yet, I'm thinking about calling it "Goodbye Green World," but Nick has a name for it that I can't remember) is an interesting song. It is supposed to bridge the gap between the Rock-ier sounds of the first half of the album and the spacey sounds of the second half. It is basically just a reverb heavy wall of sounds. It doesn't last long; just long enough to get your mind into the place it needs to be for Asteroid.
Asteroid is in a way the centerpiece of the album. It's not single material, but it encompasses the second half of the album's themes of longing and waiting. It's also the longest song on the album at 5 minutes and 21 seconds. The song relies on lyrical imagery as well as musical imagery, painting a picture (hopefully) in the listeners head of the vastness of space. It is an intimidating task, because there are so many tracks and every single one of them (except for the double tracked stuff) is playing a completely different melody. The bass line on this song is ridiculously beautiful, and I'm pretty sure it could be a song just by itself. After a day of messing around extensively with panning and reverbs, things have begun to fall into place, but I don't think I'm gonna have this one done for awhile. Tomorrow I'll be working on primarily Moostache stuff, but I'm gonna start doing For a Time as well.