As I alluded to in my previous post , "Answer" has taken the place of "10 Miles" as our second release. It's more of a piece with Aloud than Ten Miles is, but certainly quite different from it in many ways and I hope it will help flesh out listeners' sense of our sound a bit.
Answer has a somewhat interesting history in that the opening/pre-verse riff (which I just call RIFF in the structure chart below) and verse riffs are quite old, dating back to high school. I developed them contemporaneously, consciously aping the style of Sunny Day Real Estate on the verse riff in particular, and quickly situated them together, with a chorus sandwiched in between. It often takes me weeks, sometimes months, for the pieces of a new song to come together. In this particular instance, however, I never reached satisfaction. I toyed with a few chorus riffs, landing on one that I would hang onto in the back of my head, but never felt good enough about it to bother putting the song forward to any bands I was in at the time.
Flash forward to 2010, when I'm trying to get a band together in the city. I had convened a jam session with two friends (neither of whom would go on to be part of AHAS). After running through Aloud, Scared and Steal as my little showcase of the material I was writing, someone said "what else?" Not having anything really worked out, I pulled out the riffs and gave some vague instructions on how I thought it would be arranged. Thankfully, both musicians either weren't listening or misunderstood my intent. The bass player ended up continuing the chorus riff, a descending bass line, over the verse riff. The drummer played the whole thing in double time (at inception I had imagined the whole thing at the slow, half-time tempo you hear in the chorus and bridge/outro now). This revealed some new things. While I can often be rather incorrigible with my compositions, I was very opening to re-imagining this one a bit given that it had never really come together for me. I still wanted the chorus riff to have a slow plodding feel, so I asked the drummer to try starting out with that and then switching to the double time feel when the verse riff came in. Now things were really shaping up.
We played it through a few more times before I had one of those rare moments where one is able to conjure a riff out of thin air and it works. Since the verse and chorus tentatively had the same bass line (which itself evolved significantly from Pat's tinkering later on), I took the opportunity to dump that very mediocre chorus. I stopped the jam for 5 minutes to contemplate where I thought the verse was actually leading and managed to come up with what is now the chorus riff. I played it over a few times to figure out exactly what I was getting at, and then we ran the song again with the new segment. I also conjured an accompanying melody to go along with it. Initially the section was in straight 4, but after playing it a couple times that way, someone commented that it was boring and I tried to make it interesting by messing with time signatures a bit and adding a little liason at the end of the phrase. The exact timing was refined later on my own, but the foundation was there. I thought it would be interesting to try playing the chorus with a dropped quick beat on the second chord without actually changing the timing of the melody at all. I follow with a dropped long beat during the liaison at the end of the phrase, giving a a mathematically elegant 8 - 7- 8 - 6 count. This effect, while probably not noticeable to many listeners, makes the chorus riff and melody a bit more unpredictable and a bit less Billy Squire (with all due respect to the named).
The bridge section of the song was added later, pulled from my mental compendium of orphan riffs. It adds a little intrigue at a point in the song where I was worried about it becoming cloying in its poppiness. Not unlike Aloud, Answer has a slightly interesting structure in that it doesn't bring the chorus or verse back post-bridge, merely the teaser pre-verse. The format is RIFF-VERSE-CHORUS-RIFF-VERSE-CHORUS-BRIDGE-RIFF. This makes the bridge function more like a "B section" rather than a traditional bridge and gives the song a proggier feel, despite it only clocking in at about 3:30. It's interesting how cutting something out, in this case a conventional return to the verse or chorus after the bridge, actually makes the song feel more expansive/grandiose. It's calls to mind ever so slightly the mini-epics of Field Music, a band I much admire though hadn't yet discovered at the time of writing this particular song. I also like how the song is bookended by what I'm calling the "RIFF," and I tried to lyrically bookend the song too with the first and last lines, which are sung over the aforementioned RIFF.
Enough about that. Lyrics follow:
ANSWER
(intro)
It started off, I guess, fairly well...
(verse)
In the wake of what's become of our lives
It's hard to tell you that I tried
Called away, called away
I guess there's something I'm yet to find
(chorus)
Another answer there beyond the line
A new reaction nothing can outshine
(verse)
Do you remember when I used to talk like
I couldn't leave you if I tried?
No way, no way
Try to remember what it felt like
(chorus)
Another answer there beyond the line
A new reaction nothing can outshine
(bridge)
How far I go you're never far behind
Until I'm broken I won't let it slide
I can't reclaim the pieces that were mine
(outro)
All in all it went fairly well...
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
A Gratification, Delayed
I am pleased to report after a prolonged silence that the next AHAS track is on its way out for mastering. It has been a particularly busy stretch for me, and my obligations outside of music have made it difficult to make time for the laborious mixing process over the last few months. At long last however, after a graciously granted evening session last night, the next song is mixed and out the door. With luck it'll be posted within a couple of weeks.
I know I had said that the next song would be "10 Miles," but that is no longer the case. Instead, "Answer" will be the next one out of the gate. Why the change of plan? I was struggling mightily with 10 Miles as we were trying to pull it together. The arrangement as it was performed was exceedingly simple and minimal and my initial thought was to keep it really stripped down, with a single guitar, and let the vocal carry the tune (it's a melody I'm relatively pleased with). We tried various techniques to widen the single guitar by panning mics, adding reverb, or using a delayed signal panned opposite the source, but I ultimately found them all to make the guitar sound a bit "squishy" and lose most of its character and attack. I ultimately decided to take some time and rethink the arrangement a bit. After several long sessions at my own rehearsal space experimenting with keyboard and guitar sounds and trying to come up with stuff, I finally hit on some keyboard sounds that worked at the 11th hour, with a mixing/recording session scheduled for the following day. I had also devised a washy, heavily delayed guitar sound with tremolo to play open ringing chords during the dramatic parts. Suddenly the song was taking some shape, and at the mixing session the following day I tracked the guitars and keyboards (using the patches I had already created) and started shaping the thing. We also did some doubling of the vocals for emphasis (and help).
Long story short, the song is coming together really nicely now and I'd say is about 85% ready, but during this time we'd made significant progress on Answer and when push came to shove Pat and I decided it would be a better second release anyway. I'm really pleased with how it came out for a song that I've previously been on the fence about, often considering it my weakest contribution to our repertoire. I think it gained a lot from a brief practice session just before our initial tracking sessions. Pat had been fussing with that bass line since day 1, never quite satisfied with what he was doing with it. But he had finally settled on something he liked and I insisted that we go through it several times and really try to lock up the groove so that my kick hits would fall on his bass hits. Not only did we get a better groove going, we nicely developed the contrast where the chord shifts during the verse by switching from an on-the-upbeat groove to an on-the-downbeat one, then back again. I also had suggested a few rhythmic things I was doing on the kick during the chorus that Pat could follow on bass. The thing just sounds a good deal tighter than it ever did before, and the sureness of the groove lets the melody propel the song.
I also threw in some complementary shaker and tambourine stuff during the half-time bridge section, giving it a nice chunky backbeat. A little organ here and there rounds the thing out in what is arguably a less dense arrangement than Aloud, but still surprisingly challenging to balance. That said, I do think the finished product exceeds our first effort sound-wise and I hope y'all will like it.
Stay tuned for more posts and a release date.
I know I had said that the next song would be "10 Miles," but that is no longer the case. Instead, "Answer" will be the next one out of the gate. Why the change of plan? I was struggling mightily with 10 Miles as we were trying to pull it together. The arrangement as it was performed was exceedingly simple and minimal and my initial thought was to keep it really stripped down, with a single guitar, and let the vocal carry the tune (it's a melody I'm relatively pleased with). We tried various techniques to widen the single guitar by panning mics, adding reverb, or using a delayed signal panned opposite the source, but I ultimately found them all to make the guitar sound a bit "squishy" and lose most of its character and attack. I ultimately decided to take some time and rethink the arrangement a bit. After several long sessions at my own rehearsal space experimenting with keyboard and guitar sounds and trying to come up with stuff, I finally hit on some keyboard sounds that worked at the 11th hour, with a mixing/recording session scheduled for the following day. I had also devised a washy, heavily delayed guitar sound with tremolo to play open ringing chords during the dramatic parts. Suddenly the song was taking some shape, and at the mixing session the following day I tracked the guitars and keyboards (using the patches I had already created) and started shaping the thing. We also did some doubling of the vocals for emphasis (and help).
Long story short, the song is coming together really nicely now and I'd say is about 85% ready, but during this time we'd made significant progress on Answer and when push came to shove Pat and I decided it would be a better second release anyway. I'm really pleased with how it came out for a song that I've previously been on the fence about, often considering it my weakest contribution to our repertoire. I think it gained a lot from a brief practice session just before our initial tracking sessions. Pat had been fussing with that bass line since day 1, never quite satisfied with what he was doing with it. But he had finally settled on something he liked and I insisted that we go through it several times and really try to lock up the groove so that my kick hits would fall on his bass hits. Not only did we get a better groove going, we nicely developed the contrast where the chord shifts during the verse by switching from an on-the-upbeat groove to an on-the-downbeat one, then back again. I also had suggested a few rhythmic things I was doing on the kick during the chorus that Pat could follow on bass. The thing just sounds a good deal tighter than it ever did before, and the sureness of the groove lets the melody propel the song.
I also threw in some complementary shaker and tambourine stuff during the half-time bridge section, giving it a nice chunky backbeat. A little organ here and there rounds the thing out in what is arguably a less dense arrangement than Aloud, but still surprisingly challenging to balance. That said, I do think the finished product exceeds our first effort sound-wise and I hope y'all will like it.
Stay tuned for more posts and a release date.
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