July 6th, 2008
As a follow-up to my last post:
If you don’t know what a demo is, or are completely lacking in imagination, don’t listen to this.
Enjoy!
P.S. - now you can see if you guessed right about which stanza was the “rock out” stanza, unless you are so profoundly clueless that you still can’t tell after listening.
A new song began to emerge yesterday, and it’s really kind of unusual, and I love it. I should try to scrape together a quick demo so you can get the idea, but for now I’m tossing up a quickie post using the power of the English Language to flawlessly convey the sound to you.
For starters, the melody of the verse crashed in on me first. I was driving to the pet store to buy some supplies for the mice, and going over in my head what I needed. As I was driving, I became fixated on “water bottle holder”. I started singing/rapping “a watta botta ho-DA” and could barely get my brain onto the next thing. This of course is not my new song, but when I drive, I do wild improvisational singing. I need to start bringing that recorder along with me. You have to hear how absolutely twisted I get.
Anyway, just as I was pulling in to the pet store, this melody emerged out of the end of my improvisation, so I made a mental note of the intervals, knowing full well that once I got in the store it would be flushed out of my head by the muzak system. I was able to revive it when I got back out to the car, and worked it out a little further before I even got home to grab a guitar.
I try to explain to people that in spite of my rock influences, melodic inspiration seems to come from an amalgamation of the darndest things, like TV theme shows, movie music, commercials, whatever. So this melody being kind of croony-meets-theremin, I likened it to some of my favorite semi-eerie theme songs, like that from Fantasy Island, or the original Star Trek. But it also has a feel of a 1920s crooner — not just any 1920s crooner, but one with a big shiny time machine who knows time is really one big illusion anyway. And then in each verse, the last few chords start to rock out just a little, almost like the Stones did with Paint it Black, but more subtle. The actual rocking out happens in the chorus, which ends on big major seventh chords, so even though it’s big and in-your-face, there it will still be a “1970s game show” flavor to it there, and that will lead it back into the verse gracefully (he says with a wink).
This is what I have so far for lyrics (you can probably tell which of the three stanzas below is the “rock out” one just by reading them):
Soul peer
Welcome back, dear
It’s so nice to pass you on the same sphere
This thing called “time”
It blows my mind
And I truly hope that you’ve been having a fine one hereSometimes
We get misaligned
When we stick to the same script with the same lines
We’re in a rut
It’s comfy but we know
We only need to change what’s inside our mindsI’ll meet you backstage after the performance
With the whole audience
We’ll take off our costumes and congratulate us
We were the greatest
We wouldn’t take less
We were the show, yeah, yeah, yeah!
So here’s my user-friendly (he says with a resigned sigh) road-map to the screenshot above. We’re somewhere in “week 2″ of recording four-part harmony vocals for This Is Your Chance. As I said earlier, it’s rather ornamental, non-repeating, dense, frilly, embellished. I still insist that at the core it’s not “complex”, but that’s a brawl for another pub. The bottom line is that it has to be done in tiny sections, tweaked, and edited as smoothly as possible. And I’ve been working on it for nearly two weeks now.
The top (red) track, “Guide (whole thing)”, is the whole song repeated four times, one for each voice, with a computer-sequenced speech synthesizer singing all the parts. It’s muted for the time being.
The next (purple) track, “Guide (what’s left)”, was an exact copy of the first track. Only, as you can see, most of it has been deleted by now. Each time I sing a bit and get it lined up and sounding decent and in-tune, I erase that part of this track so that I can easily see and hear what I still have left to sing.
The next track, “takes as they go”, is exactly what it says it is. This is my wide-open work area. Instead of singing along with the guide track, I find it a little easier to play a section of it and then sing it back; I can better hear what I’m doing that way. So I play a little bit of the guide, and then sing it. If I need to, I sing the bit several times until it “feels right”. I don’t have to line it up while I’m singing, because I can always drag it into place afterwards.
Even after I get a “good” take, though, I usually find I still need to edit it a little to make all the syllables line up right, and also want to slightly adjust the pitch of some of them. This is easy in Tracktion, because you can split a clip into smaller clips and type in a new “speed” value for any one of them. (Normally a clip’s speed is at 1.000; if you type in 1.01 the pitch goes up a percent, or if you type in .99 it goes down a percent — a semitone is about 6% lower or higher — I rarely have to adjust it by much more than 1 or 2%, which doesn’t noticeably impact the character of the voice.)
When I’m happy with how it sounds, I drag the edited clips (blue) down to the “accumulated good bits” track and cut that much more out of my guide track, again leaving the “takes as they go” track open for more raw recording.
The yellow track below that, “rough first take (test)”, is muted; it was just a rough run-through of all four voices without any attempt to perfect anything. As you can see it is 1/4 of the length of the other tracks, this is because I’ve dragged all four voices on top of each other to hear how they might sound together. It is quite out of tune, sloppy, and has a lot of random background noise. And it was important to do, because it gave me a vague idea of what I might have to look forward to if I put in the work.
The green track below that, “incomplete (test)” is something you can listen to right now if you didn’t listen to it last week. It’s a partial rendering of what I had so far of the “good” takes, again merging all four lines together, but with more than half the bits missing. It was good to be able to hear how things were progressing.
Now you can see how much more blue there is than purple … that shows how much of it I’ve done and how little I have left to do.
One “lost track” in particular from Through Forbidden Black Doors, called This Is Your Chance, didn’t make it to the ‘98 CD … most probably because no one could actually sing it.
It started out simple enough, with a nice chord progression and a clear-cut meter for the lyrics (which have never been revised, save maybe a word or two, since the 1988 draft), and apparently for lack of a better melody, according to the old-old sheet music I’m looking at now, just followed the original simple version of the rhythm guitar triplet part. I apparently wasn’t too committed to who exactly was supposed to be singing it, and hadn’t yet decided that it would be a chorus.
Fast forward a few years — early 90s — and I’m getting serious about recording the whole opera in my own studio. This Is Your Chance is still considered part of the running order, and by now I’ve decided it’s going to be a four-part choral arrangement, so I’m going to have to actually write those parts. The repetitive rhythm is a little too bare-bones and uninteresting, so I’ve decided to play with it, and then play with it some more when a friend of mine looks it over and complains that what I’ve written “doesn’t swing”.
I work this all out in the wee hours of the night on my trusty staff paper while working double-shifts at the Atlantic gas station in depressing East Rochester, when the customers are few and the hours are long. I stick with the “soprano/alto/tenor/baritone” format that got drilled into my head in college, but other than that, my solitary constraint is to avoid doubling.
I apparently also avoided any kind of repetition whatsoever, so all the individual parts are awkward to sing, each new phrase throwing a curve ball to the singer. It would be hard enough to nail just one of the four lines; doing all four was out of the question.
Time and time again I try different ways to get an acceptable performance on this excruciatingly difficult four-part vocal arrangement down on tape so people can actually hear it in context. I try speaking the whole part and then running it through a vocal unit that does vocoder-like effects, with a computer sequencer controlling its pitches. Sounds too robotic. I try whispering the parts and then running that through very short delays to give the impression of pitch. I try using Flinger in conjunction with Festival to speech-synthesize all four parts. I try to find live humans to sing it, only to send them running in terror from the demo and/or sheet music.
I’m not sure exactly when I decided to give it another shot just singing the damn thing (bumping the girlie parts down to a manlier octave, which will make some of the harmonies kind of dense and clustered-sounding), but certainly the transition from tape to software made it at least feasible, if still not easy, to break the task into small pieces and micro-edit to satisfaction. It is also among my most put-off of musical chores; if you had asked me at any point within the last few years what recording sub-project I was procrastinating on more than any other, this would be at the top of the list.
Taped next to my bed (a good place for it, I might add) is a short handwritten note to myself: “TAKE SLOW ACTION”. This is after decades of alternating between taking no action (in many areas of my life), and working myself into a frenzy to make up for it. No wonder I lament any inability to get into a sustainable flow state. The key lesson, of which I am in constant need of reminding, is: don’t worry about doing the whole thing, just do a little bit of it, at a relaxed pace. The roll will come later.
Thus came time to apply this lesson with regard to the dreaded This Is Your Chance harmonies. One evening my assignment was to simply copy a guide track (I used the speech-synthesized version as my guide) from the old computer to the new computer. Another evening it was to create the folder I’d be working in, and the Tracktion project file with the imported guide. Another it was to set up the microphone stand. Some of my small daily goals are saved as text messages on my cell phone, and I should keep doing that.
Here’s a great recommendation to anyone with a little bit of cold feet about recording: do a “crap take” right away. Just hit record and start singing. I did this with all four parts just so that I could hear a “worst case scenario” of what they would sound like together. And yeah, it was clunky, but I could get a hint of how it might sound once I took the time to nail all the notes, and that helped inspire me to get down to business.
It is still extremely difficult and time-consuming, lest you think otherwise, to record all these phrases at four different melodies apiece and then tweak all the tuning and timing of nearly every syllable. After seriously working on singing and editing for a whole weekend, I am, as of now, still less than half done. Enjoy it in all its under-construction paint-by-numbers imagine-the-missing-bits glory!
