#3 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Did I mean to say this track sucks?
An “ashcan edition” or “ashcan copy” is a comic that was knocked off and published solely to lay claim to some IP, so it’s associated with poor quality. I really liked the phrase, but it’s majorly self-deprecating in hindsight.
“Hey, this track is just a throwaway piece of crap!”
What a cool guy move!
I actually really like this track, it’s one of the ones that came together fast and really immediately conveyed a curious little sound world that I wanted to explore.
‘O Superman’ chords
But wait, I can pretend that the name is drawing a super sketchy line from this track to a Laurie Anderson song that has a comic book superhero in the title, because both tracks have the same basic two-chord motion!
That’s not at all true, but oh well.
That chord progression involves practically playing the same chord over and over, but dropping the lowest note down a semitone, then back up. In this case we’re in E major, so the chords alternate between an E major triad in root position (E, G#, B) and then when the bottom note moves it becomes the second inversion of G#m (D#, G#, B).
Those chord names sound fancy compared to what’s actually happening if you just sit at a keyboard and play it!
These two chords are played on multiple instruments, which sound pretty similar and blend together. There are points in the track where I invert the bright, sparkly chords for a little bit more motion. So, the first chord becomes the second inversion of E major and the second chord is just G#m in root position.
Ringing percussion
A big part of the track is a drum loop fed into something that makes it resonate or ring out like you’re hearing it from the other end of a tube… Here’s that loop dry, then through the tuned resonator, and then through a reverb that washes it out some. The dry loop is probably unrecognisable.
I feel like it’s pretty unromantic to reveal that the resonator is a template given away on a YouTube tutorial, but it is. If you’re a Bitwig user reading this, I recommend you download the template. It’s cool.
As you can hear at the end of the file, the resonator changes pitch so it’s basically it’s own riff.
Blurpy vocals to add friction
I decided the resolute niceness of the sparkly synths needed something to offset it. That’s what I was aiming for with this noise that punctuates the end of phrases. It first shows about 22 seconds in.
This sound’s pitch is often quite clashy with the rest of the track, but I kept it fairly low in the mix so it’s hopefully the right amount of weird.
I think this is one example where it’s worth being specific on the tech involved. I’m using a “sample-modelling drum machine”, a bit of software called Visco, which lets you load in two sounds and move between completely sound 1 and completely sound 2. I mean, it does a lot more, but that’s what I’m doing in this track, playing with the territory between the two sounds. You can see this blending in action from 41 seconds in on this video.
When you load a sound in, Visco doesn’t just play the recording back but instead analyses everything about it and tries to model it with a synthesised version. Why? Because then you can play with those settings. When you morph between two sounds it’s not like fading out one recording and fading in the second one, it’s more like you’re recalibrating all the settings on a synth to find some middle ground between the settings that give you the first sound and the settings that give you the second.
This creates freaky and unpredictable effects, and in this case, really wonky pitch stuff. That’s because I loaded in two short phrases of a woman singing from some R&B acapella, rather than loading in drum sounds. (I have a whole ripped DVD of acapellas from the late 90s (thanks Alan!) that I’ve dragged from computer to computer since. They’ve shown up on Jet Jaguar releases since 2003.) In the two phrases, the singer is not hitting the same note, so when you morph between them the results are … unreliable, let’s say.