#6 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Name from a pop rap hit
I explained the name for this one and talked a little about making it when I talked to Tony Stamp on RNZ National, and it’s briefly mentioned on the page I’m linking to, so I won’t repeat myself here.
The guts of what I’ve written here is also in that interview, but what follows goes into more detail and includes audio examples.
Another rework, more 11 8 time
As with ‘Patience and Glue’, this had a previous incarnation I considered finished and then just parked, with a sense that it was fine.
Here’s the version from 2022: almost all of the same elements are actually in there, but mixed quite differently.
More wonky time signatures, counting to make life easier
Compositionally, the big difference between 2022 and 2024 is that the track is not in the same time signature. This older version is in 11 8 time, like the first section of last week’s track. What are the odds of two tracks in 11 8 cropping up in a row? Stupidly low, but given my first ever released track was in 11 8, back in 1996, I am 100% certain that predisposes me to thinking of it when I decide to get into oddball rhythms.
There was a drum troupe (is that how you spell it?) in Wellington back in the mid-90s and I remember talking about my first released track ‘Seeper’ to one of its members. She said to me she just thought of rhythms as groups of 3s and 2s. If she could count “1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and” that was easy, while saying “it’s in 11 8” sounded a bit scary. That was a revelation that still makes heaps of sense to me. It’s not everything, but it’s one really helpful model.
Think how many pop songs you could say are 4 4 but you could more helpfully count like “1 and a 2 and a 3 and”, the tresillo. Alternating groups of 3s and 2s comes pretty naturally.
Vocoder percussion
Anyway, ‘Small Things Popping’ is not in 11 8! The first thing I did was to explore the percussion patterns that are front and centre in the above version and drag them about on screen to find patterns I preferred. I ended up on a pattern in 7 4. Without the bass in there this is not so easy to count, but here’s the percussion soloed.
I wrote about vocoders when writing about ‘Trellis’. Here I am working with individual drum hits sliced from a drum pattern going into a vocoder. So I am using them as samples, playing them back at different pitches (mainly up and down octaves) to create the pattern.
All of this then goes into big dub effects that are sometimes much louder than the dry drum sounds. I like that. Classic dub records often trigger that feeling of overwhelm, like everything is exploding and might fall apart shortly. Not sure anything I make will ever quite walk that line, but I was at least walking in sight of it?
Ukulele and birds up front
I also strongly remember wondering if I’d like the track more if I swapped the foreground and the background some – and that turned out to be right.
So, in the finished version, we start straight away with loud ukulele plucks, which are really present throughout.
What you’re hearing is basically the first time I tried mucking about on a ukulele. I recorded it on a somewhat soggy long weekend with friends in the Wairarapa, summer 2022. A friend had brought her uke and I, being me, had brought my little audio recorder. In some quiet moment I just sat outside the rental and faffed about with this one chord voicing I had learned. I can really vividly picture where I was sitting and the feeling of being there, under a verandah with light rain coming down. Mostly ukulele, but plenty of birds. Welcome to New Zealand.
Modern audio software lets you very easily drag about the timing of events in recorded audio, and I did a lot of that, so that strong notes land on at least an 8th beat. It’s stretched and looped throughout, so it repeats itself every 12 bars.
After that, I’ve added echoes of varying intensity throughout.
elelukU
There’s actually another layer of ukulele and background sounds in the finished track, recorded on the same weekend, but this one is reversed and processed plenty.
Raw version:
Heh, this recording is almost more cicadas than anything else. Those jerks! I guess the rain had stopped.
In the track:
The recording is reversed, then I’m only letting the middle of the frequency spectrum come through (bye bye, cicadas, up in the crispy high end) before two different layers of echoes wash out the sound. The 1-minute-ish recording is looping, with no regard for how that lines up with the tempo of the track, so loud parts will come and go at different places relative to whatever else is happening. It’s all smeary and quiet enough that any shifts in emphasis are really subtle in the final track.
For the production wonks, that’s Bitwig’s Filter > free plugin Valhalla SuperMassive > Bitwig’s Convolution reverb with a very synthetic impulse response that spits out a series of filtered delay taps, called “Spectral Repeats 07”.