6/7/09
KeithHandy posted in Producing on June 7th, 2009
I’m hopefully writing.
That’s what I appear to be doing.
Now I must poo.
A guy’s gotta poo what a guy’s gotta poo.
This is so much better, yes. Ahhhhh… now, what was I going to type about? Whatever I want to, so here we go.
I’ve been working in the archives, where I have years and years worth of recorded musical stuff that “only needs a little bit of love” as they say on the Peanuts.
OK, where was I…
Only needs a little bit of love, right.
So the little anemic Christmas tree of the day would be “(She’s a) Rag Doll”. I had already fixed up the second half to be both a.) better and b.) truer to the original. This isn’t a reversion, though; it brings back more of the Episodes version, but at least for the instrumental outro, simply speeding it up has given it the energy it was lacking, whereas my mid-90s “remake” of that section was kind of chaotic. That section was sort of supposed to feel like a cross between the Kinks’ “Lola” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”, and hopefully it succeeds at neither while still being what it was meant to be in its own right.
Working my way backwards from that, the quiet part at the beginning of the outro needed significant cleanup, primarily to do two things: 1.) to put in the ride cymbal pattern that I had painstakingly worked out, where each beat-four hit was preceded by one more sixteenth note than in the measure before it, until the entire space between beat two and beat four was filled by sixteenth notes, and 2.) to cover up the rhythmically awkward CZ-1 “organ” with a re-do of the same organ part, using a sampled hammond.
Back from that, is the fanfare section. I think of this as the “Bad News Bears” section, even though I could not for the life of me tell you what the theme music to “Bad News Bears” sounded like. It’s also reminiscent of the mellotron fanfare arrangement from Richard Wright’s “Summer ‘68″. Anyway, the trick with this one, which I did while I was still living at Cedar Commons with Christy, was to extend it by a bar in order to pitch the whole bit up a whole step and still land on the correct ending chord. I’m sure I spent a few weeks on that, knowing myself, though I can’t say for sure.
The fanfare section did not exist before the mid-90s version (or not as a part of this song, anyway); this was partly “orchestrated” on the keyboard-slash-workstation I was borrowing from Paul Gaspar, using Cakewalk on the old Zenith computer (no GUI, no mouse). I don’t remember the make or model of the keyboard, but it was a fairly large thing, and I used it extensively on Unfinished Business. Anyway, I had this section still split between a few tracks, unlike the Episodes stuff, so that gave me a little flexibility to reconstruct it. The reason I pitched it up a whole step in the first place was to accommodate a resurrection of the 3/4 part that had been dropped altogether in my mid-90s version.
It’s not that I was planning to drop it. I started work on this part, but the monitor on my computer gave out. Not being in a position to buy anything new, I committed what I had to tape by blindly using the shortcut keys for “rewind” and “play”. I had been in the middle of working on an extension to the 3/4 part that would have hopefully segued into the fanfare bit. The original end of the 3/4 part modulated briefly to A minor and had to go through another modulation to get it back to G. I was going to rework this to get to G minor instead, which the fanfare was originally in, but at that point I had cut my losses and scrapped the 3/4 part altogether. Now that I was going to bring it back, of course, I decided to shift the fanfare up to A minor, and add the extra bar to get it back to G. The fact that the pitch-shifted fanfare sounds clean and continuous is a small miracle, and doth please me.
So this weekend’s work was on the aforementioned 3/4 part. I’m using the mid-90s backing track, but trying to import some of Garrett’s vocal from both the GFI mix and a crude recording of a live show. Neither of these is isolated, but what I’ve done is “cut around it”, added delay to the last syllable of each phrase, and a swelling-up of backwards reverb at the beginning of each phrase. It’s not so much an illusion as a nice effect; we are in one universe, and then another universe “whooshes in and out” without losing the beat.
There was some decidedly whacky, spastic guitar playing all over my mid-90s version, which I made even whackier with electronic re-harmonization, etc…. but it seems that the more of that I cut out, the better I like it. It was interesting in its own right, but with everything else, it’s obnoxious, and it keeps fighting everything else for the spotlight. Hence, for now, the 3/4 part has no spaz-guitar. And I think it breathes better that way.
As it is now, the whole song can be mixed down and nothing is either missing or slated to be cut, as far as I know, although I should probably come at the verses and choruses with a fresh ear.
