Time Disappears – Ray Toler

After posting You Bought This, I bopped along to it for several repeats while doing some cleanup, walking the dog and other miscellanea. Being happy with the lyrics and the production, I was in a pretty good mood and actually had a few hours to sketch out today’s track before bedtime.

Looking back at the last six days, I’ve been pretty productive. Some are obviously stronger than others, but nothing outright sucks and I think all of them have redeeming qualities and potential for further development. But again, I’m at “blank slate” stage and my hack of shuffling my Random Finds playlist wasn’t grabbing me. Finally, one track made me listen for a bit longer. It wasn’t something I was inspired by, but it was very tempo and reminded me that I’d wanted to try some more Drum and Bass (DnB) this year.

Time Disappears Ray Toler 4:58

The only problem with that initial thought is that I’m on a streak; I’ve written an actual song with lyrics and vocals every day so far, and DnB is normally more instrumental. Maybe some samples, but I don’t hear much with lyrics.¹ I wrote about my guidelines for the month in Rules of Engagement, but a new one started emerging as the week progressed: don’t avoid writing a song with lyrics just because there’s no immediate inspiration.²

Participating in Song-A-Day for the last eleven years has taught me that I’m capable of making music every day. I’m sort of pushing myself to apply that lesson to songwriting this time. I’ve got a really loose grip on the reins, but I’m not letting laziness or inertia overcome that inner voice encouraging me to keep trying.

The Writing Process

I opened up a new project and started up XO with a fast pattern to try and write against. But I had no clue what to write about. This is the point in the film where there’s a brief montage of lots of crumpled up pieces of paper hitting the wastebasket, but I finally found something that I thought was worth exploring. As a bonus, it allowed me to satisfy the “be vague more often” guideline.

When I “finished” the lyrics, I was happy with their somewhat poetic nature. Poetry is an art form that I really appreciate, but don’t necessarily enjoy. I admire people who can find such amazing imagery or the exact right word, but I just can’t read it or listen to it very often for enjoyment. In this case, I’m not creating any amazing metaphors, but I consciously tried to apply the “show, don’t tell” rule of writing. After reading through several times, I realized that the lyrics were incomplete and wrote the final four lines, and it was exactly what was needed. I had no idea how they would fit vocals, but that’s a tomorrow problem.

Great. I’m more or less happy with things, but have absolutely no melody or idea how I’d sing them. They didn’t feel very rhythmic, especially with this DnB beat in the background. At this point, I decided that maybe these lyrics would have to be saved for another day and started working on music.

Revisiting The Old Gods

I wrote last year³ about the Cthulhu plugin from Xfer Records. It’s a wellspring of inspiration, especially when I know I need to avoid my usual habits. I plunked around for a while until I found a series of chords that I liked, which you hear as the main motif in this piece. I auditioned using a piano, but I moved it to a synth as soon as I finalized it. With that looping along with the drums, I thought there might be a melody in there somewhere, so I recorded a scratch vocal with some improvisation.At this point, it was bedtime, so I closed everything down and listened to You Bought This some more.

Next Levels

Awaking to a rainy Pacific Northwest morning, I had coffee, wrote yesterday’s blog post, played with the dog so she’d leave me alone, then fired up the studio and opened the project. I listened back to the scratch vocal and I didn’t hate it. Good sign. DnB is normally pretty production heavy, so I started exploring synth sounds.

In some ways, it was very complicated, and in others quite simple. The focus of most DnB is, unsurprisingly, the drums and the bass. I wasn’t trying to break new ground here, just produce something competent in the time allowed. I found an ok 808 bass sound and plunked a bit against the chords. It was sounding ok, but kind of lifeless.

I decided that I needed to stack some synths on the main hook. Something to give it dimension, but while still leaving space for the drums and bass. In the end, there are four primary synth sounds, and I moved the octaves around at various times either to fill things out of make way for the vocals.

It was all sounding ok, but still wasn’t wowing me. It was monotonous and never went anywhere. In songwriting craft, this is why we have choruses and bridges and breakdowns. Except these lyrics don’t really fit that at all. I didn’t even know what to call each part when I was setting markers for the arrangement, so the markers are just the first few words of that section. I suppose I could call them A, B, C…

It was those last four lines that proved to be the linchpin – they needed to be their own thing. Going back to Cthulhu, I found the chords I had in my head (but voiced in a way that I probably wouldn’t have done myself). With those looped, I then started playing with some other chords and came up with the decidedly weird (and vaguely prog-rockish) turnaround that immediately follows. I recorded the vocals pretty quickly, doing a minor bit of tuning on a couple of sustains and locking down the doubling, but generally leaving them as sung. I put some basic effects on (a touch of verb, a delay, and my favorite H3000 vocal effect) and really never touched them again.

Album art for "The Seduction of Claude Debussy" by Art of Noise. — I love this album so much!

Ok. Now I’m happier. Except it just sounds… I don’t know. “Bad” isn’t the right word, but I was still unhappy with the overall sound. That’s when I realized that the problem was with the drums. They were completely electronic and never changed. Wondering if I might be able to spice them up a bit with acoustic drums, I opened up Superior Drummer⁴ and started looking through the MIDI. And I found exactly what I was looking for. It was so perfect, that I deleted the XO track entirely. I can’t really express how happy I am with the drums now – it immediately made me think of The Seduction of Claude Debussy by Art of Noise which is one of my favorite albums. If you like DnB and haven’t heard it, you should add it to your listen list immediately.

The final “next level” moment was one of those that makes the entire arduous process of writing and producing music completely worth it. The “stars streak by my eyes” section became the emotional pinnacle of the track, so I paid some additional attention to it. I wanted motion and added the phasey pad sound, but when I added the extra octave to the last half, I literally laughed out loud with joy the first time I heard it. It may not seem like much, but it’s the poetic equivalent of les mot juste.

The Final Mix and Quibbles

The vast majority of work on this track was done before printing a single bit of audio down. It’s all programming and detail work – something for which I don’t have a lot of time. As a result, when it came time to do the actual mixing, there really wasn’t all that much to do other than set levels. I put a subtle (for me) pan on the filtered synth that comes in a couple of times, got the final mix level set, and bounced it.

Listening back this morning, I felt it was harsh – too much high end. I attribute this to the UAD ATR-102 plugin I have on the master fader. It sounded good last night in my headphones, but was over-the top and almost painful listening at volume on speakers this morning. And if my old ears are bothered by it, younger people will really hate it. I asked a friend for his take (without telling him what I was bothered by) and he had the same comment. I accidentally ended up with 10 seconds of dead space at the end of the track, so I’ll be fixing that and reposting it. I’m going to address the harshness while I’m at it.

I will absolutely be revisiting this one for polish and finalizing in the future. I think it’s a really good song, which surprised me given how completely anchor-less I felt when staring at the lyrics after writing them.

Lyrics

The ground below
Moves faster than I can see
Wind through my hair

The world I know 
The world where you are here with me
Has vanished in a swirl of air

I can’t hear you
But I feel you
I am with you
We are here

When you call me
I remember
I am with you
We are here

A gentle rain
Then skies are clear
Though we remain
Time disappears 

The flowers bloom
I know you’re near
A sonic boom
Time disappears

Stars streak by my eyes
The smell of earth and sky
Beautifully sublime
Vanishing with time

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Superior Drummer 3, Diva, Hive2, Omnisphere, Keyscape, Pigments

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Valhalla, H3000 Factory, UAD ATR-102, Cthulhu, PanMan, Filtershaper XL

Notes

1
A notable exception coming from my dear friend, Artemis, who is wholly responsible for me being involved in this insanity.
2
I’m treating this as the converse of one of my favorite cards from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies card deck is “Don’t avoid what’s easy.”
3
See Here and Now
4
Far and away one of the best purchases of the last five years. I’m sorry I waited so long to get it.