spoon wrote on Wed, 10 January 2007 14:21 |
Me too. I want to know what his thinking was like.
I totally loved this, whether by design or a happy accident. I think this one was the cat's meow!
Regards, spoon
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Whew, I convinced one person... that's a relief.
All my tweakery was by design... I decided early on to just go for it, dam the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
I'm more of a songwriter/producer than anything else, so the major problems that jumped out at me were:
1) the verses are all identical... I think the lyrics are even the same? I think tunes need to evolve constantly, so fixing this was one of my major objectives. At the same time, I wanted to improve the dynamics, making the tune build up naturally...
2) the drums are, imho, a letdown... they don't do enough to support the stunning vocals, guitars, etc. Maybe because I've never been a drummer, I'd rather hear no drums than weak drums.
There's enough rhythmic interplay in the guitars (especially the bass double, which ended up central to my mix after I reamped the heck out of it) that I think the tune can survive long stretches without em.
To solve the first problem, I tweaked the verses like this:
-- first verse, just the kick...
-- second verse, bring in the snare, just on the 4s, and make it big (though maybe not big enough now that I listen again)
-- third verse, drop out the elec guitars so the vocal and bass are features, and the arrangement can seethe, burn and collect itself for a big last chorus. I also brought in some echoes of the vocal from a previous verse.
For the second problem, I built some extra rhythm tracks with tempo sync'd delays, then comp'd together a more inventive arrangement. I didn't do any time-correction or sample replacement.. what you're hearing is just a subset of the original tracks, plus two tracks I manufactured -- the hi hat, and a doubled kick drum (the double is an eight note later I think).
I wanted the choruses to bounce a bit, to get some contrast with the straight verses, so I brought the funky delayed hi hat way up... Last bunch of indie rock shows I've been to, something strange going on... these kids, they dance. Dismemberment plan a few years back, I swear I saw someone moonwalk.
Speeding up the track was a last minute whim... A few weeks back, there was a thread on PSW about how common varispeed was in the tape days. After some fiddling, I figured out that I could use r8brain to do a very clean "sample rate varispeed." So given that this tune was played slower than I'd prefer (booze will do that, as I can attest from experience), I figured I'd try it out. I think mine is just a few bpm faster than the original... the sample rate I used to varispeed was 42500.
-Garret