Here and Now – Ray Toler

The last track! I’m normally happy to post anything at this point in the journey and have certainly thrown some “contractual obligation” pieces up. This one, however, is one of those happy times where I not only had a decent idea, but the time and energy to actually produce it.¹ There were a couple of days relatively early in the month, in fact, that I had a good idea, but abandoned it because I just couldn’t bring myself to do all of the work I knew it would take.

Here and Now Ray Toler 3:44

When a good track shows up late in the month, though, that’s kind of like a bonus prize.² I think I’d gotten some new creative energy after picking up the Stepic step sequencer earlier this week. While it plays only a minor part on this track, it definitely sparked not just ideas, but larger sweeps of interest that I may pursue after the taxes are filed.

The Idea Bank

When I was getting the studio ready in January, I started playing a bit in the evenings just to get back into the habit of firing up Digital Performer and playing. For the most part, this was just me playing for the pure enjoyment of it combined with exploring some of the new tools I’ve acquired since last year. Occasionally, I’d find a cool sound, chord progression, or melody that I wanted to remember, so I created a sketchbook project.

I’d refer to it every now and then when I was desperate, but in the end I think I only used two of the thirtyish ideas I’d recorded. Most of them were just sound washes, and none of them were as interestting to me a few weeks later. The first idea I used ended up becoming Change Your Behavior. I thought that one was going to be an instrumental, but lyrics just happened to show up.

It was similar with today’s track. What I recorded was the big synth and chord progression you hear as the main hook in the song. I’d told Mary at the time that she’d almost certainly be hearing that one at some point in February, but then immediately forgot about it for the entire month.

Actually, I think I did play it at some point around week two or three, but it was one of those days where there was no way I was tackling what I knew it would end up on that particular day. As with Change Your Behavior, I thought this was going to be an instrumental, but when I got the drums added in behind the hook, I was pretty sure it would end up as a song.

Paying Tribute to The Old Gods

The progression itself came from a night when I was messing around with a plugin from Xferrecords³ named Cthulhu.⁴ This is an older MIDI tool that does two things. First, it acts as an advanced arpeggiator. You play in a chord and it spits out individual notes in a variety of patterns. I’ve used it for that a couple of times, but mostly I use it for its chord bank module.⁵ In this mode, you play a single key and it spits out a chord. As you move up the keyboard chromatically, Cthulhu plays the next chord in the progression.

It includes a lot of chord progressions in various modes and scales, notably including nearly all of Bach’s chorales, which are a treasure trove of interesting chord changes. I’ve never used a pre-existing pattern, though. The way I use it is to find interesting or beautiful chords that I would never play because after 45+ years of writing music, I’ve fallen into a couple of ruts. When I put my hands on the keyboard, they inevitably fall into some old patterns and I end up playing the same thing I always do.

Cthulhu, however, shakes all of that up. For this particular track, I found a few chords in the C# Minor / E Major diatonic collection and worked out the main hook you hear in this song. Even then, those chords could have been anything. It could have been a quiet piano piece or a guitar-driven song, or a jazz thing… when I pointed it at the big rave synth sound, though, I knew exactly what it was going to be.

These creative tools, along with the inevitable influx of machine learning, can be a massive help. I don’t use them to write the music,⁶ but I do use them to spark my own imagination and send it in directions that I don’t normally go.⁷

Incubation

There’s this weird time while writing a song when I’m not sure if it’s going to “take” or not. Most often, it’s the lyrics that I’m concerned with. Sometimes, the words come quickly and work.⁸ Sometimes the idea wasn’t fully developed, and sometimes I simply don’t have the poet’s gift.

While I won’t go into meanings or possible interpretations, I can at least say that the lyrics came from a place of contentment and happiness. We’re having a false spring, and the sun was actually shining. And today is the “parade of planets” where the other 7 planets in the solar system⁹ are visible at once in the night sky in a mostly-straight line. Quite literally, the planets were aligned.¹⁰

With those two based-in-reality lines, the tone was set and it nicely matched the emotional content of the big synth hook. We’re heading into Happy Festival Trance territory! I still wasn’t sure, though, if I had enough to write about and even if I did, where’s the chorus? And then I ad libbed “here and now” on one practice run and it all came into focus.

Another Day, Another Genre

Ok, so I’m incapable of sticking to one style. That’s true for a lot of things in my life, but especially music. I love all sorts of music and Song-A-Day has given me an excuse to try my hand at creating things I’d previously only listened to. I’ve now written hip-hop, country, drum and bass, techno, house, cinematic, classical… This has been particularly true over the last three to four years.

But I’ve never tried a trance song. Like most EDM, trance has a bazillion sub-genres and I have very little idea what separates one from another. For that matter, I’m not entirely sure this is “real” trance, but it sounds like it to me. 138 bpm, four-on-the-floor kick drum beats, giant bandpassed synthesizer patches, multiple arpeggios, and a positive, happy vibe you can dance to. Close enough for me.

The biggest technical challenge for me on this one was managing the insane frequency spread. Normally, you want an instrument to sit in its own frequency range and not have to compete with other things. The synths in this piece, though, are very wide across the frequencies, so you can’t use as many of them at the same time unless their timbres are sufficiently different.

As an example, there are two sawtoothy synth parts, one bright¹¹ and one dark¹² Playing them both at the same time can make it sound more thick and full, but it can also start overwhelming certain frequencies so that everything distorts or simply isn’t pleasant to listen to.

So as big as this sounds, it’s a relatively low number of parts. There are two bass sounds, the two big pad synths that play most of what you’d sing, two arpeggiated runs, and some assorted white noise swooshes. Oh, and there’s the “ok, now that’s trance” synth sound that comes in and doubles the hook during the final chorus section.

There’s a lot more going on, though. One of the arpeggiators is playing 16^th notes, but I’m also randomly panning it every 1/8^th note. Both of the big pads are being sent to an effect that does a lot of effects work including echoes, gated rhythmic bits. Various things are sent to get some reverb, delay, or phasing/flanging effects.

Vocals were pretty straightforward. Once again, I sang entire sections multiple times, then comped together the best of each take. I’m starting to like this approach more and more over my previous method where I’d sing the entire thing, then go in and punch in over trouble spots. Quite often, I’d end up overdubbing pretty much the entire thing, which can make the overall performance sound pretty disconnected. I’ve done this a lot over the years, so I think I’m reasonably good at it, but doing comp takes preserves a lot more of the emotional performance. Additionally, I’ve found that I don’t need to do anywhere near as much tuning when I’ve got a good comp to start with.

This is probably the most-involved production piece I did this month. There were others that took me longer to complete¹³ but none that had as many technical moving parts or required quite as much fiddly work. It’s a testament, though, to how important practice is. When I started Song-A-Day, a track like this would have taken me at least a week. I did this in… eh, let’s call it 12 hours total if you include the little fixes I did after posting it. To be fair, a decent chunk of that time was just listening back because I was enjoying it.¹⁴

Lyrics

Today
The sun is shining
The planets are aligning
And miracles are everywhere

So just breathe
And take a look around you
‘Cause the magic will astound you
It’s a day beyond compare

There’s no you or me
Not tonight
Lose yourself
In the light

Here and now.

Tomorrow
Is a problem for tomorrow
It might be joy, it might be sorrow
But we’ll face it like we always do, but

Tonight
The path is set before us
We’ll sing another chorus
And I’ll whisper what you always knew

Open your eyes
Look in mine
There’s another world
For us to find

Here and now.


Copyright © Ray E. Toler, Jr. All rights reserved.
www.raytoler.com

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

XO, Pigments, Diva, Hive 2, Omnisphere

Effects, Mixing, & Masterng

FabFilter, Gullfoss, Kraftur, MOTU MW Equalizer, Valhalla VintageVerb & Delay, H3000 Factory, PanMan, Cthluhu

Notes

1
I’ve admitted multiple times that I go way overboard on my production during the month. Now that I’ve got #10 under my belt, I’m considering doing a year where I’m restricted to piano and voice only. Don’t hold me to that, though.
2
Those Who Crossed the Line from last year was another happy surprise.
3
Makers of the incredible Serum soft synth
4
Yes, the cosmic entity / eldritch god created by H. P. Lovecraft. I don’t know why the plugin is named that, but the marketing tagline is “The Chord and Arp Monster.”
5
In fact, I’d used it this way just a few days ago on I Don’t remember.
6
A lot of people do, and they’ve got thousands of fans and followers
7
See “Old man yells at cloud” news story.
8
Most often, these are either humorous songs or an example of the “I’ve been working on this for weeks in the back of my mind” phenomena I covered in my post for Invisible Biscuit.
9
Justice for Pluto!!
10
I went out to look, but I missed a couple that had already gone below the horizon.
11
More high frequencies
12
A lot of the high frequencies being filtered out.
13
Falling, Don’t Fight the Funk
14
This is a weird aside, but I think this is the type of song that the show Letterkenny would use in one of their superb slo-mo montage sequences. I’ve discovered some really cool music through that show.