The Light of Day

Four whole versions of one lousy song!
KeithHandy posted in Old skool, Producing on September 9th, 2007

I didn’t mean to. Honestly. It just kind of happened.

If you really want to experience this from my perspective, scroll down and listen to the current version first, and then come back to the top and work your way back up to it. If, like most sane people, you don’t have that much time on your hands, just listen a little ways through the first verse of each one and needle-drop somewhere in the middle to hear a bit of the solo.

1988/89

This is my first four-track cassette demo of TIYC. I was still “just a keyboardist” so everything is drum machine and keyboards. All them “guitars” are distorted keyboards, the only guitar-like sound I was capable of making. If you listen to several my demos from that time period, you will rapidly reach a point of never wanting to hear that sound again.

The vocals are missing altogether, but somewhere there exists a version like this with a simple vocal added a few years later. The ultra-complicated four-part vocal arrangement didn’t exist until 1994, so when I did go to sing this, it was just a simple rhythm over and over on three notes.

1995

By the time I “got serious” about recording my rock opera, I was faced with the problem of how in the heck I was going to do that insane four-part vocal thing. I think I tried every “cheat” I could think of, one of which was to sequence all the pitches and hook the computer up to one of those DigiTech Vocalist thingies. But that sounded too much like a vocoder, so I didn’t keep that. For this version I tried to run a whispery voice through very short delays to make the notes, and apparently it was only marginally successful, so I re-recorded some parts in a more… conventional way… if you use the word “conventional” loosely. They don’t sound as unintelligible as I remembered them to be, but they do sound weird.

Hm, there’s a tambourine during the solo. Did I play that?

The 1995 version of my rock opera was important because a.) that’s when I really made the biggest leaps production-wise (what I’m doing now is comparitavely incremental), and b.) at the end of the year I threw a listening party to showcase it. It was mostly people I knew, but hey, it was still an event.

With 90 minutes of music to record and mix, and me being just plain sick of laying down guitar parts, I invited my friend Garrett to play the solo heard here. Notice there’s actually a walking bass line now (albeit synthesized), instead of just fast triplets on the root notes.

2002

Never quite happy with the metronomic triplet drum machine feel of previous versions, and wanting it to “swing” a bit more, I stupidly brilliantly recorded the bass guitar first for this version. Without a click track. Then I pasted drums on top of it and tried to make it feel rhythmic. The drums at the very beginning and end are lifted from one of Jeff Lewis’ recordings. I also got fancier on the arpeggiating guitar, playing groups of four notes even though they’re triplets… but what’s more noticeable is the gargantuan drum sounds and occasional reverse reverb; I’m not sure what the motivation was for that.

You will probably notice the vocals are now speech synthesized. I may have briefly considered keeping them as the official vocal part, but I quickly faced the truth: they’re just a guide.

Bonus: isolated speech synth

Here’s the synthesized vocals by themselves.

2007

The current version. (This mp3 is slightly quiet relative to the last two; sorry for the inconvenience.) You may have seen posts on this blog about “the hardest vocal part in the world”. This is how it sounds when I put myself to the grindstone and just do the work. Hooray! Fucking difficult it was, eh mate? Don’t ask me to sing this live; it ain’t happening.

The intro should sound familiar, since it’s just cleaned up a bit from the 2002 version. And the little violin bit (courtesy Mike Edwards) has actually survived being transplanted and re-transplanted since the 1995 version.

The underlying rhythm track is smoother too. Maybe a bit toooo smooth. [*makes shifty eyes*] It’s pretty much all sequenced on the computer, but using samples of real drums and real bass notes played by real me, so it’s franken-legit. The arpeggiated guitar has grown even more complex too, with seven-note, six-note, five-note and four-note patterns, but it doesn’t jump out as being such, because it’s textural. I just like it to be varied. Hey, if you’d been working on a song for 20 freakin’ years, you’d change it up a bit too.

In a way, comparing it to the others, it seems like maybe it’s too mellow. I do miss some of the “rocking-ness” from earlier versions. But first, well into the home stretch of a bombastic 90 minute piece, it might be good that the production style doesn’t compound the listener’s fatigue. And second, it doesn’t have any mastering on it yet, which should make it a bit “bigger”.

~

So admittedly, not an absolute favorite per se — not in my top twenty as individual songs go. Just a neurotic compulsion fueled by a series of technical challenges. I think since I was running out of ideas when I wrote it, it turned into a musical lab rat for ideas I’d come up with later on, because hey, it’s not like I’d be ruining anything.

Okay, that’s that. I hope you enjoyed it for whatever it is!