There’s an old saying in the Song-A-Day community that week three is when things get weird. I say that I’ve been starting in week three on day one for the last few years. Today is a good example.
- Put On Your Best Dress Ray Toler 2:22
It’s a sad reality of the way software is licensed and copy-protection-infected makes it difficult to really try things out before purchasing. You can watch all the YouTube videos you like and listen to all of the demo tracks, but you’re never going to know if audio software is going to work for you or not until you dig in and use it. And unfortunately, most plugin vendors won’t do refunds. Some won’t even let you sell your license to someone else. It’s one of those areas that really screwed the vast majority of us because our legal systems don’t keep up with our technology, and some business people took advantage of that early on to make digital products protected differently than physical ones.
Another area where the law is both woefully behind and out-of-step with technology is copyright. That’s a lengthy rant, so I’ll spare you. What I really want to talk about is sampling. Most people are now familiar with the concept, but just in case you aren’t, samplers are devices that take a recording of audio and allow you to play them like any other instrument. We mostly think of samplers as digital devices that became prevalent in the 80s, but they’re actually older than that.
I’m not 100% on the history, but one of the very first commercially successful and widely-used samplers was the Mellotron. This was a keyboard instrument that had 35 keys, each of which played a recorded tape that was contained inside the device. When you pressed a key the tape played and when you let go it rewound back to the beginning. This was pretty revolutionary and was used on some famous recordings like Strawberry Fields by The Beatles and Knights in White Satin by The Moody Blues.
Though terribly limited and lo-fi by today’s standards, they were a miraculous breakthrough at the time. They’ve now become a nostalgic sonic flavor for all sorts of genres. You can actually still buy one of these things new, but they’re big, heavy, and the tape sets are expensive and hard to maintain. It’s mostly collectors and wealthy musicians that have them. For the rest of us, GForce Software makes a fantastic plugin version called M-Tron Pro IV. Even better, they’ve digitized a vast number of tape banks, and even included libraries from similar instruments that used slightly different technology.
One of the weirdest of these was the Optigan, which was made by Mattel. Yes, that Mattel. It was made in the 70s and aimed at the home organ market. Rather than audio tape, it used translucent 12” discs that looked like records, but rather than a needle, they were read by an optical sensor. Each disc had a collection of musical loops, nearly all of them full arrangements by bands or small groups of musicians, covering a wide variety of styles from bluegrass to marching bands to cha cha to “Polynesian Village.”
I Didn’t Come Here for a History Lesson
No you didn’t. But I wanted to explain where this song came from. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I have a lot of software that was a risky purchase. Some of it just sucks and some of it has a lot of fun-factor and novelty, but has limited use-cases. M-Tron Pro IV is one of the latter. It’s an excellent plugin, but if you don’t need the sound of these old samplers, it’s going to be hard to get a return on investment. Still, it’s a lot of fun to play, and I’ve had it inspire music even if it didn’t end up in the final recording.
Last night, I ate dinner, finished watching a terrible movie, and headed up to play in the studio. The last three tracks have been downtempo, so I was thinking I’d do something more beat-oriented, maybe fun, maybe electro, maybe house… Scanning through the list of plugins, I went to the GForce stuff and realized that I hadn’t played with the Mellotron in a while. I clicked around for a bit looking for something sample-ish that would sound good as a hook with a beat. And I found the loop that opens this track.
But as I played with it, I developed enough of a structure that it started sounding more like a song. Not that I had any words in mind, just that it had the verse/chorus structure and I thought it would be kitsch to throw a decent rap beat behind it. And then I thought, no… I bet I have some jazz drums in Superior Drummer that would sound even better, and I found them. And then it’s a no-brainer to add the upright bass. Hey, maybe there are words in there too. There were!
Lyrics came pretty quickly once I’d decided to jump all in on the 20s swing thing, and the narrow EQ on the voice was also a trite but obvious choice. I had to go in and do a little timing surgery because not all of the Optigan samples started on the beat, but everything started sounding pretty tight.
Recording the vocals went quickly because this is a character voice and I normally feel that it being a bit loose is part of it. I tried not to go too overboard and turn it into parody. Not sure if I achieved that or not, but I like it.
I started mixing everything and decided that it was still missing something. A piano. Yeah. Ok, let’s throw a piano in there.
The real trick of the mix was getting the balance right1Get the balance riiiiiiiiight. Depeche Mode is going to be in my head all day. between the modern instruments and the old band samples. The first several times through the drums basically assaulted me when they came in. I kept pulling things back, but then it would sound too thin and wimpy.
The solution was to compress the drum mix, then add an additional parallel compression to even everything out, and pull the cymbals back by several decibels. While most of the default mixes in Superior Drummer are excellent, these were just too hot. They also were occupying a lot of the same frequency range as the loops.
When I brought the piano in, it was too big. I started with Pianoteq, moved to Keyscape trying several “worse” sounding pianos like an old Wing upright, a tack piano, but nothing was sounding right. I played around with EQ trying to remove some of the bass and make it sharper, but my end solution was to use a brighter preset in Pianoteq and pan it off a bit to the left. It just needs to support the bass and you’ll hear it peek out every now and then, but the loops are the focus and the hook, so I kept it pretty background, including some very sparse playing at times.
I’ve been using the UAD ATR-102 tape simulation plugin a lot this month. It’s useful for adding saturation and imparting that “big tape” sound, though I’m not 100% sold that it’s right for as many things as I’ve used it on. I started to add it, but then realized that I haven’t used most of my other UAD plugins acquired last year. The Capitol Mastering Compressor used on the mix bus of this track is based on a custom-built compressor that lives at Capitol records. It is the sound of Blue Note and a lot of other classic recordings. I added it, chose a basic preset, and it sounded great. I don’t know if I couldn’t have gotten the same results from one of my usual choices, but I do like this one a lot. It also looks cool and, while a superficial thing, that sometimes translates into me making “cool” choices.
This was a fun track to write, fun to sing, and I have a good time listening to it. I don’t think it’s quite “Week Three” weird, but it’s definitely a novelty song. When I posted A Monkey On Your Back on the tenth, Darin2Another Song-A-Day participant who makes incredible solo piano recordings. Please check him out! said that he wanted to see the rest of the Revue that it came from. I suspect this might have been one of the later acts.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
M-Tron Pro IV, Trillan, Superior Drummer, Pianoteq
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, Valhalla, Gullfoss, UAD Capitol Mastering Compressor
Notes
- 1Get the balance riiiiiiiiight. Depeche Mode is going to be in my head all day.
- 2Another Song-A-Day participant who makes incredible solo piano recordings. Please check him out!