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Wednesday, 29 June 2005
Sweden, day 19 ::
Tuesday we more or less finished Where You Lay: more melodies on Hammond organ, an out-of-tune Mellotron voice pad that made me cringe at first (but later layering with an in-tune sound changed things dramatically for the better), more melodies on Minimoog, Wurlitzer organ, Virus and CS-60. I told Christoffer that it seems he builds complex synth textures by combining multiple simple ones.
After dinner we opened Agents of Change and discovered a horrible sync problem between the click and the piano. I have a vague theory about what caused it ... my Logic document has its first tempo event at 1.4.0. So what’s the tempo for those first 3 beats? Christoffer and I both were very tired, which didn’t help, but after maybe half an hour of groaning we got everything lined up correctly.
The first big thing to add to the track was real piano. Of course we’d saved the most challenging piano performance of the record for late in the evening of the last day. I just laughed at the absurdity of the situation.
Tempo is 115 bpm. Somehow I pulled off the 40 measures or so that start here:
Until I got here:
I realized that I had composed/recorded the part at half tempo, never having played it at full tempo. I became convinced that it was not playable. Or was it just my condition? We ended up resorting to some serious digital surgery for those 4 bars, which was twice as hard as it might otherwise have been for Christoffer because the piano was recorded with 4 mics, two right behind the soundboard, two in the room, and the splice points had to be later on the room mics because the piano’s sound reached them later.
When that was done, we discussed what remained on the piece. The melody needs to be played on a variety of different sounds. I’m going to record a bunch of tracks at home and send them to Christoffer to pick from. We did two passes of Taurus bass pedals, excited that we were almost done. Well, there are a few loose ends to clear up before Christoffer starts mixing on his own next month, but now enough of the album was in the can that we “declared victory and went home.” We had a drink, chatted, and began to pack up and clean up.
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