Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track.
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’d started a track but knew it would be too involved to complete with the time available. But today is a new day, and I’m starting early. Part of what I knew would make it time consuming is it’s based around an old spoken word recording. And when I say old, I mean very old. Over 100 years old, in fact.
It is a travesty of intellectual property law that you have to look that far back to find audio recordings in the public domain. The entire point of copyright law is to balance the need for artists to be able to exploit their creations and earn a living, and the need of the public to have creations available for new creations and innovations. While I could rant on this for thousands of words, I can summarize thusly: current copyright terms (author’s life plus seventy five years, or 125 years if the “author” is a corporation) provides little to no public benefit and, further, provides little incentive for the creator to keep creating once they’ve made something that’s earning money. But, as with so many other things, he who has the gold makes the rules.
- Raggedy Man Ray Toler 3:55
Uh, Are You Going to Talk About the Song?
Yes. Ok. I wanted to make a dance track, specifically one with a “hook” sample. Something that’s unique or otherwise makes it catch your attention. Yes, I had to go back more than 100 years to find something that would be legal for me to use, but such is life. The recording in question is a recitation of the poem Raggedy Man, written by James Whitcomb Riley in 1888 and recorded by Sally Hamlin in 1917.
I didn’t even think about it until the song was already finished, but I realized that in this new, enlightened era, I had no idea if a “Raggedy Man” referred to something that might result in one being cancelled or hauled into the stocks on the public square, so I had to look it up. Thankfully, it’s simply a freelance hired worker or handyman, and has no racial, sexual, or slavery implications.
The Song?
Ok, so this is a pretty straightforward arrangement, typical dance track, etc., etc. There are three things that I found to be interesting techniques or educational challenges.
First is the audio recording itself. Cleaning up old hissy things is no longer the challenge it once was. I think I probably passed it through iZotope RX, but it might have just been some EQ and judicial compression / noise gating. When I opened the project, I was surprised to find an instance of Stutter Edit,1Also by iZotope indicating that I had planned on doing a lot more sample mangling. I suspect I ran out of time.
Instead, I had to be satisfied with pushing and pulling the often idiosyncratic performance so that it would be in time with the music. The quality and capability of modern tools in this regard is truly astounding! I have a track with the entire original recording, but would just snip out the parts I wanted to use, move them to the main sample track, then edit them as appropriate.
The second thing that I was really jazzed about at the time is the huge sawtooth synth chord that enters at 3:10. I’m no longer as happy with it as I was when I did it, because it doesn’t hit as hard as I remember, but I think I now know why and would be able to get even closer to what’s in my head.
I’m also not as thrilled with the pumping effect on that synth, but that’s because I was working quickly and just freehanded the control movements. It really needs to either be a sidechained compressor or have precise controls drawn in. It’s an easy fix if I were to ever revisit this one.
Finally, I took an interesting approach to keeping the drum loops from getting monotonous. I had four main drum loops coming out of Stylus RMX. One of the things I really love in Stylus is its Chaos Generator. This function adds random double hits, pitch shifts, rolls, and so on, and you can dial in how crazy things get. I recorded both normal and chaotic versions of each of the four loops, each eight bars long, then had them play in different combinations with each other, always with at least one normal and one chaos loop going. Rather than do this in audio (which is what I would normally do), I did it with MIDI, sending both the normal and chaos version of each loop to a single audio track. This allowed every chaos section to be different as well. It’s a technique I’d probably use again, because there’s no “same same” in the drum loops anywhere in the piece.
It was a pretty involved production, possibly overdone a bit, and I consider this one of my “genre studies.” I’ve done a lot of dance production, but this was the first time I’d gotten close to anything in the euphoric trance area. I feel like if I do it again, it’ll be even better.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Stylus RMX, XO, MOTU Model 12, Hive2, Omnisphere, Korg Polysix, Korg MonoPoly, Rise & Hit
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, Gullfoss, MOTU Masterworks EQ, MOTU Clear Pebble, Soundtoys PhaseMistress, Waves OneKnob Pumper, DS Tantra 2, Valhalla VintageVerb and Delay
Notes
- 1Also by iZotope