Winter Sun
By onezero on January 1, 2017 8:07 pm
What a year! Thank you all for listening! I tried to get this one in for the Sunday deadline...but apparently the new year and the script clocks didn't play nicely with each other.
This one came together quickly with percussion, bass synth, and lead synth, though I had to mull over the guitar balance. It seems summery.
As promised, production notes! Drums are two drum racks: a dry trap kit (Auto-filtered the kick with a high-pass to accentuate the resonant frequency and low-passed the kit with drive to take some harshness off the snare and cymbals) and a 909 (high-pass to accentuate the kick, low-pass with drive on the whole kit). I also added a kit of miscellaneous percussion.
Next up was a synth bassline with Analog, sawtooth through a lowpass with a very low cutoff frequency (135 Hz), and a higher organ-like synth (cutoff 378 Hz). Initially these had a more minor-key feeling to them, and I didn't want to end the year on an ominous note, so I tweaked a few things to be less obviously oppressive.
Then I put on some Electric (MkI 2 crunchy), and gave them a Simple Delay send (4 L, 5 R). I then tracked snippets of guitar, all with the Epiphone Moderne through the Vox Wah, but also some with the Reuss RF-01 fuzz on. I ended up using most of the snippets, adding another channel for clean guitar counterpoint and keeping a third channel for the fuzz guitar. Both channels of clean guitar got Auto-filter, one high pass (and Cabinet), and one band-pass, both with drive. Each went to a different convolution reverb, to differentiate their apparent space.
Mixing/arranging was tricky--I was able to carve out different spaces with the differences in filtering, but some of the fundamentals of the notes were very close, so I had to rely on the filters and pan for differentiation. (In the end, I think I should pull the clean guitars down a bit, bump up the fuzz guitar, and definitely bump up the synth and Electric.)
Not a lot of automation on this one, but I did put M4L Humanizer on all the MIDI instruments, and auto-panned nearly everything. Full-chain master on the 2-mix.
Thank you all for listening!
When I unpluggeed, the shorting made a nice sound, so I went back and recorded that, and put it at the end.
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