Blood & Cleaner
By Catthew O. on May 8, 2016 11:54 pm
For this track, I asked my FB and Twitter friends/followers what I should do in my song, bad ideas also welcome. Unfortunately, bad ideas is mostly all I got.
Official list:
Include reggaeton, bossa nova, d-beat, slam, "djent", and vaporwave
Make use of swung 15/8, the hirajoshi scale,and parallel minor thirds
Include a solo section for toilet paper
Use distorted bird call, vuvuzela, rubber band, any sound at all that referenced a particular friend of mine named Weaver, FL Slayer, that airhorn sample with a vocoder, the first page of Treaty of Versailles, a sound from Mario Kart (SNES), "Star Wars", "Turquoise", snare drum roll with a rubber fish, and this one explosion sample that a local hip-hop DJ always uses in his mixes (and also sometimes when he's talking)
I'll explain everything below the photo, for anyone who might be interested. (I'm a music teacher, I feel like I have to!)
I don't have time to do something this involved for the next two weeks, but I am definitely going to be back at this for week 21. You should ask YOUR friends and such what to write. I'm sure they have great, bad ideas!
I make these for almost every song I write, but they're not usually this chaotic and goofy:
Details:
In order to address all of the styles, I had to think a little bit about how they could interact, so the "slam" and "djent" things I knew I could combine without issue. I also knew that reggaeton is all about syncopation, so those three could play together. The other styles are fairly evident where they exist, except for the vaporwave. I knew there was not going to be a good way to actually do a full vaporwave influenced section, so for one fraction of a moment I just did a bunch of sound design with the Dx100, analog modeling for a brassy pad, and D50 out of my XV5080.
The hirajoshi scale works in the way other pentatonic scales usually do, so I was able to use that just for that frantic triplet horn run that happens twice (also where I used a Mario Kart sound. Love that brass.)
I did not, however, actually mess with the tuning system, so I know it's not true, and I also know there seem to be multiple interpretations of hirajoshi in even temperament so I just picked one that sounded good. That's also how I picked my key signature!
The bird sounds (which I didn't have a chance to record but from my window with a KM184 pointed out the window) and the airhorn vocoder both happen in the early part of the sound as percussive elements. The bird sound does not sound like itself, it's just a stutter in the right ear at about 13 seconds in. The airhorn vocoder probably reveals itself fairly obviously.
Funny enough, that's probably the sound suggestion I was given that I liked the most when all was said and done.
Parallel minor 3rds was something I knew right away how I was going to use it because I definitely wasn't going to figure out a way to make those sound any good melodically. If you listen to the squeaky synth toms, those are tuned in minor thirds and descend chromatically at times.
For rubber band and vuvuzela I just made soundfonts. The vuvuzela came from a dumb internet video and I just locked it to one pitch, and the rubberband I recorded in a cave made of packing blankets and a music stand, draped over a table. I strung the rubberbands over the top of a mug and used the wooden table to amplify the resonance. I used pens to adjust the tuning (I didn't even have to autotune it!)
The rubberband accompanies the Xylophone in a few spots and the vuvuzela is the chords on the upbeats during the reggaeton section, as well as appearing with that weird chromatically descending riff at the end.
Now, I don't have FL Studio, so I couldn't actually use FL Slayer, but I did have this really goofy example song my friend made me years ago called "FL Slays m@" (m@ being the name certain people refer to me by) because I had no idea what all of the sounds it makes were. I just sampled a moment from that and used it in a place that should be evident.
I also used that cave to record toilet paper ripping and hitting the tube. There's a single bar long break right before the song changes timbre that's all toilet paper sounds. My solo was complete.
For the explosion, I just mixed it as a background sound at 1:37ish for the recapitulation of that section.
To reference my friend Weaver, I used a really really lofi recording we made of this grindcore band we had for one day, called Piss Fist. There happened to be a kinda isolated snare drum hit, so I used that in various spots. Piss Fist was a three piece band that came into existence purely to play one house show. My computer died at the pre-show rehearsal so we didn't even get any full recordings.
For the Treaty of Versailles, I knew that would be easy because MetaSynth exists. I did have to use Photoshop to increase contrast, decrease saturation, and invert it to get it to sound good though. It appears as part of the end of the song.
Also at the end of the song, the rubber fish snare drum roll. The reason this was even requested in the first place is because I had this silly video on Facebook that achieved a couple hundred thousand views two years ago of me flopping a rubber cast of a flounder around on a snare drum. I just sampled that video and ran it through the KP3 with two of the Loop settings for manipulation.
The rest is all my decision so, yes, the random black metal guitar that happens was purely my decision. I wanted to slowly introduce the guitar so the sonic character of the guitars for the silly, but required, "djent"/"slam" thing wouldn't be COMPLETELY out of nowhere.
76 tracks + 4 stereo buses
Made use of lots of software in LogicPro 8 + Yamaha MU50, Korg X5DR, Roland XV5080, Korg KP3, EHX Voicebox, MXR Bass DI+, ISP Decimator, Epiphone Les Paul with stock humbuckers, SM57 (amp, vocals), Marshall JCM 2000, Dx100, various modular and guitar pedals for noises, and Neumann KM184 (toilet paper, rubber bands, birds).
Over all, super happy I did things this way. It made me really stretch myself to make things stay cohesive despite being completely unrelated (I generally hate music that covers tons of stylist ground by way of different sections that hardly sound related. Sorry iwrestledabearonce and certain Naked City songs.) Definitely looking forward to enough free time to do it again in two weeks!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
