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Wednesday, 15 June 2005
Sweden, day 5 ::
This morning I woke up early, around 8:30, and began bouncing the tracks on one song with many virtual instruments and complex volume automation. After working on it intermittently at the guest house through the morning, I finally finished the bounces in the break room at the studio around noon and realized, in Logic there is a command to export all the audio tracks, and it bounces them as part of that process. That would have saved so much time on this and other songs! I should have read the manual!
We continued working on Cobblestone Mirrors. There’s a section of synthetic textures that we’ve dubbed the “fish tank.” Christoffer suggested layering it with an “analog fish tank.” I used both hands and both feet on a Hammond organ, working the volume pedal, pedal bass, drawbars and upper manual. While I played, C twisted knobs controlling the mix with multiple reverb chambers and a Binson Echorec, an ancient analog echo machine that records and plays back from a rotating steel drum. Some good things happened during both of our two takes, so we combined the best of the them. The piece is now approaching downright scary in places, which will be a nice contrast to some of the more melodic passages. Then we recorded parts doubling and accentuating the piano and bells, using toy piano and glockenspiel.
Christoffer then suggested that this piece seemed to be well along its way and that we pick up another after dinner. Justin had gone to Malmö for the rest of the day, which made it best that we work on one of the pieces where we weren’t going to collectively rework the structure.
So after dinner I quickly transferred Remembering Breath, an ambient improvisation. C doubled the simple melody on soprano sax and then we added some backwards reverb to that. One funny moment: he pointed out a throbbing synthetic bass texture, asked me if I knew what that sounded like (no), switched to iTunes and played the beginning of Genesis’ I Know What I Like (from Selling England by the Pound I think) and we heard pretty much the same texture on the same bass note.
After fine-tuning the mix, C bounced the whole thing through an ancient Studer tape deck, with the recording levels set high enough to get a lot of saturation and distortion. He would occasionally jostle the deck and touch the reels, causing some brief dropouts and subtle to dramatic pitch fluctuations. The first half of the song now uses this giant, dark organic sound, and then in the second half it slowly transitions to the more pristine original digital mix, with the occasional addition of some of the analog tape monstrosity as the piece builds to its climax.
Added a sample of an operatic soprano, using pitch bend between the notes to give it a bit of a “barely under control” quality.
We agreed that since the piece was mostly big sweeping textures, it could use some more “pokey” kinds of sounds. So I recorded:
- hand bells and rain shaker in the echo chamber
- mallets on a pair of cymbals (from subtle to aggressive enough that a mallet went flying twice and I lost my headphones twice)
- pounding a hammer on the frame of a sound baffle
- using a broken wooden chair Christoffer had tossed out the back door a few days ago, smashing the chair with the hammer, the hammer breaking, continuing to smash the chair using pieces of itself, pieces of the chair flying around the room and landing (momentarily interrupted by C’s wife bursting into the studio, afraid that we were being assaulted until being reassured that we were just Making Art), sliding the broken pieces of the chair on the floor into a pile, and rattling them against each other.
We’ll see how much of this sounds good in the morning. But I think we will actually finish and mix this one first thing tomorrow; C says there’s something special about the way things are set up right now.
I’m feeling much better about our pace now; if we continue to “launch” one song a day now, we should have everything ready for Jens to add drums on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.
Today C told two people who he was working with, and both had similar reactions: THE Doug Wyatt? No, if I were THE Doug Wyatt I would own dougwyatt.com :-) At the end of the first day I’d recorded piano parts, when C created a new folder on his hard disk for the project, he made a typo: “Duog Wyatt.” I quipped, yes, “Duog” means “do over again.”
Update, 17 Jul: more pictures
References:
Pictures from the studio (13 July 2005)
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