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Friday, 24 June 2005

Sweden, day 14 ::

Today was indeed a long day.

Helena came to sing a little after 11 am. First we worked on Cobblestone Mirrors, for which I’d composed an extensive vocal part the week before coming to Sweden. That part shrank a bit when we arranged the song, but it was still substantial; it’s the focal point of the song in three separate sections, one short one with 6-part harmonies, 4 of which she sang triple or quadruple-tracked (the 2 lower ones I will attempt myself, later). She was the consummate pro, needing just a few takes at the beginning to adapt to the situation before nailing most of the rest of the takes on the first try. Her voice has an unusual quality to it, and we later noticed that it bore a surprising resemblance to the vocal stack samples that I’d used when composing the parts.

That song took maybe two or two and a half hours. Then we did Where You Lay, where there’s a vocal line just in the chorus (and chorus tail). That went quite quickly, slowed only a little by taking some time to arrange a part for her based on some of the synth lines.

On Don’t Know I Know, I’d had an idea: there’s one tiny spot where one of the synth sounds is morphing on the fly, hits a vocal sound and then changes to something else quickly—what if that voice sound were amplified and extended? That was way too subtle. Instead Christoffer made a “vocal fishtank”, a big delay and a bit of distortion “that is unavoidable when you start chaining together lots of analog gear.” Helena just improvised over the track, never having heard it before, and there were a couple of stunningly beautiful moments. It was so good that we did another pass on the whole track and there were some more magic bits that we’ll keep. C said later that it seemed she just got inside the music, and I agreed.

Christoffer suggested that she improvise over Implications, which has some key changes in some surprising places. Since she was hearing it for the first time, it wasn’t surprising that she didn’t always hit the transitions, but on one or two she happened on a common tone between the key. There were some other really nice moments in this one too.

We found one choir-like line for her to cover in Artifacts and Fantasies; that went quite quickly. Then on the spot she invented a catchy melody for Serentripidy, which we’d just opened on a whim. We weren’t sure if it takes the song in the direction we’re aiming, but it was a great effort.

Helena’s singing moved me to tears at least 5 times over the course of the afternoon. I’d feared that some of the melodies in Cobblestone Mirrors (played by synths in my demos) were too simple, bordering on trite, but sung, they were completely different.

I went outside for a smoke and Justin went to pick up pizza from the Danish place. Helena came out and we were still chatting when the string quartet arrived at 5 pm.

Justin returned with pizza shortly thereafter, and we asked the string players to please get set up and tuned while we ate quickly.

We started with Cobblestone Mirrors where the strings did something I think will mesh nicely with Helena’s vocal. It was quite a rush to hear my first string quartet arrangement played.

I was a little concerned about Artifacts and Fantasies; there are a number of bizarre meter shifts that attempt to follow an improv. To add to my anxiety, we’d done something to the sequence that had made the click track out of phase; it took a few minutes to fix that. We started with the end, where the piano, cello and one of the synths are off in a world of odd-length phrases, while the violins and viola superimpose a (mostly) constant quarter-note feel. It took some time to get that section right, but the players graciously worked out phrasing and dynamics despite my charts not having any, and got increasingly comfortable and confident with the part. I was very happy when we finished that song; it sounded so big and alive.

Somewhere in there I ended up in the room with the players, doing some kind of impressionistic twisting of the hands, arms and body, in ways that might conceivably assist in the performance and interpretation of the music. Some might call it conducting. I did manage a few gestures to indicate dynamics and downbeats.

Next was Agents of Change; first we did big string chords through the middle section. Then Christoffer suggested that all four players play the melody in 3 octaves, so I quickly printed another set of scores, did a back-and-forth with the players about phrases that needed to be transposed down an octave, and then we recorded that.

The only piece where my string quartet arrangement had to be changed significantly was Where You Lay. Not surprisingly, I hadn’t ever carefully checked the strings against the rest of the arrangement; I’d just automatically had them double the piano in the chorus and one of the synths in the chorus tail. (This is the danger of writing string arrangements while listening to drum tracks being recorded!) The parts turned out to be too busy during the chorus, and the chorus tail was [a] written too high for the viola and [b] making the cello obscure what worked better as a part for two violins. I’d suspected that the part was a little dramatic and not easy, but not as tricky as I’d expected; the first violin goes way high (Ab6) and the second violin is playing some very exposed sustained quarter notes not far below. Despite everyone showing signs of having recorded for nearly 6 hours nonstop, the players came through really well.

I was really happy with all of the string parts.

* * *

Last week we sent out a press release about the project and have stirred up some interest from music technology magazines.

One writer wanted a picture showing the backs of our racks and how things are wired together. That left me scratching my head. Consider this workflow:

Do they want to see the crucial Ethernet cable which bridges Christoffer’s and my worlds?

I suppose a certain amount of interesting stuff happened when I was building the parts I brought here. The vocal sample morphing technique I wrote about last month looks like it may have a prominent spot in Agents of Change. There are a few other spots where bits of digital audio got twisted around in interesting ways inside my computer. But, there’s no interesting gear photo to be had here.

All of the interesting “wiring” is happening in the studio patch bay. I took a few pictures of it the other day when it had grown to a particularly dense and unnavigable state. (If it’s like that when we’re not deeply in the middle of a song, often Christoffer will decide it’s time to pull out all the patch cords and start over again.) But one set of patch bay wires looks just like another; I don’t think even Christoffer could tell what was going on from anything but the most zoomed-in picture.

* * *

Friday is a national holiday in Sweden, Midsummer’s Eve. Christoffer’s family has taken off for the weekend. We’re invited to join them for a celebration. We have work to do. We’ve been working hard and are approaching burnout again. I wasn’t looking forward to having to have my 135-lb. keyboard case as company for a 24-hour vacation in Iceland (wishful thinking was that the airline could hold it, but post-9/11 that’s not possible).

Fortunately, Christoffer’s schedule has some flexibility in it. So I rescheduled my return. We’ll take Friday off, work Saturday through Tuesday (when I was originally going to leave), and I’ll leave Wednesday instead.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005, 02:07 +0200
[ Making music ]

References:
Pictures from the studio (13 July 2005)

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1 comment

  1. I really can’t wait to hear this.

    – Keith, Saturday, 25 June 2005, 18:07 PDT

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