Triumph In Blog

Including “WALLY & ME!”

I kinda liked breaking down the samples and tracks for THE HIEROPHANT, so I figured I might as well do it again for this, my newest release. Only some of these are really built primarily from samples so I’m not sure if this will be as valuable as it was last time. Still, including WALLY & ME, it’s an interesting insight into production process to consider how some samples pull double duty, or simply change radically as time goes on.

There are 6 songs on CAREFUL, ICARUS…, but 3 of them were made ages and ages ago, only now remixed and finalized as supplements to bigger songs. Or 7 songs, if you send bandcamp.com 2 dollars with paypal, of which I think I see like 60 something cents? I don’t know, I’d make it free but eventually if too many people download it they just make you price it out anyway. That’s why these are all on youtube! Speaking of: if you listened to WALLY & ME on youtube, I beseech you listen to the updated version I put on soundcloud, with a more robust bass sound. I initially suppressed the low end a lot because it sounded too overpowering, but I’m not sure the end result is really what I wanted either. I’m leaving both versions on soundcloud so that you, the people, may decide.

TRACK 01: CAREFUL, ICARUS…

Whew, I almost used all 8 of my tracks for this one…pretty complicated stuff. Counterintuitively, there’s only 1 real “sample” in here at all, and it’s the looping component of the Peewee Herman breakfast machine song that you hear over the top, sort of on the right. I originally conceived of this song when I had the idea that this little chime part could serve as a sort of cut-time metronome for a very aggressive bass. I fiddled around with layering it on top of a couple different bass sounds, but it wasn’t until I considered the space in between the sample loops themselves that it all came together. I sort of hit a first-try home run with that call and response sound in the mid, and from there it was easy to build a SurgeXT bass that sounded like it could cut through. SurgeXT is so goated…it’s feeding my addiction to not ever sidechaining anything to anything!

Those 3 building blocks make up 4 of the 7 tracks. The drums are kind of a hybrid of MD16 and 707 sounds, because I love dancehall crap from a million years ago. The little breakdown section in the middle was also a lot of accidental success, because it took me a while to sit and stare in silence at the screen until my hands basically moved on their own. A lot of trial and error that resulted in a hail of snares that I ended up loving. If you can discern that choppy, futuristic arpeggiator all around the midsection of the song, that’s the 7th track, which is just a default eurythmic arpeggiator from Ableton, and it’s panning all up and down the garden path.

Now, in all honesty, the song you hear on bandcamp now isn’t 7 tracks–it’s 2. You see, there IS an 8th track in this thing, but it wouldn’t cooperate with my arpeggiator correctly. I exported the existing 7 tracks, then put them in a whole new file, and split that exported file into 2 little sections. The 8th track can be heard briefly, only once, right at the end of the breakdown. That little jingle, if you’re unfamiliar, is an RPGMaker 2000 sound effect, and it kept randomly popping into my head while I was making the song. I thought the transition back into the “chorus” section was too lazy, and wanted a nice little 4th wall break to make it feel more impactful. Did it work?

TRACK 02: PAUL THE PENGUIN

My first ever cover, and if you are familiar with the original (floated around youtube for 10 million years) you will notice that it’s not exactly as simple as the original. Radix’s original work is composed of very few tracks that are cleverly built with delay effects and repeated tracks at an offset to give the impression of space beyond the hardware capabilities of trackers at the time. Me? I’m not that clever, and I’m coddled by having a hundred billion plugins. Rebuilding this song in Ableton was originally just a hobbyist exercise that turned out to be so difficult that in all the exceptions and new techniques I had to come up with, I realized I had injected enough of my own style and thought process that it sounded meaningfully different from the original.

So, now we have a song with 10 TRACKS! What?? Well, 8 tracks and 2 return tracks–I’m usually so lazy I just skip the idea of “busses” and “workflow,” and put individual effects on each track. With only 8, this is pretty easy to organize. Except having so many tracks needing the same effects at varying strengths and at various points in the spatial mix, making little delay tracks for both channels and sliding them up and down was my best bet. This is realistically built like shit, but I really liked how it turned out primarily because I ended up reeling in some of the insane reverb I usually throw at all of my problems when I remember that I don’t know how mastering music works.

Most of what I like about this song is the stuff I hallucinated into the formula, actually. I tried to maintain some of the original ideas because I find them pleasing, such as the percussive, crispy bass and the warbly, intermittent mid. But those are only tracks 4 and 5; track 6 is the single drum sound, a 505 snare with way more low end baked into it than originally conceived, and tracks 1 and 2 are the 2 sides of the lead that I actually built as an instrument 100% from scratch with saw waves (SurgeXT again) to have dynamic velocities based on pitch. I actually produced something! And they have their own delay effects that are inconsistent between channels, to make it sound like the melody is traveling around! For what it’s worth, the bass is an 808 with a little electronic tom sound built in for more attack, and a “Bass 1” from SurgeXT to give it some body. The warbly part is a basic saw wave with only 1 voice that I put a crazy LFO on.

Much more significantly than patting myself on the back, though, are the REAL hallucinations in tracks 3 and 7. Track 3 is the arpeggiator section in the right channel, which was a little too hard to accurately transpose from just listening to the original. I honestly could not tell and still cannot tell if there are really that many notes actually playing sequence to build that rising and falling feeling that skates over the top of the song, but I decided to go whole hog and just assume “yes.” In the first half, this resulted in making the high end of the song feel incredibly busy and chaotic, which I like because it makes that beautiful second part (which was way easier to hear in the original) really stand out. I think the whole track is louder than originally intended, where that little chirping sound is really just supposed to be a lower layer for the melody. Track 7 however has NOTHING to do with the original, and was entirely of my own machination. In trying to EQ the song to have those same, soaring overtones that can barely be made out in the original, I found that I was just making it all sound too murky. I felt it best to kick the delay/reverb back and actually process it more intelligently, to avoid swallowing the melody whole. This led me to finding the song thin, and boring; my solution was to add a string of long chords faintly underneath it all to make it more robust. These are basically the same saw waves as the other part of the mid, but pitched and EQ’d down to help get out of the way. You tell me–doesn’t it sound so full?

Besides all of that, track 8 is a little thumping tom drum that just constantly drives eighth notes forward. The original song seems to have some component like this to make it feel more percussive, and I found that some of the quiet moments were simply too quiet without it. You may be able to tell that the operative differences in the original version and my version mostly have to do with volume and fullness. I love walls of sound, I can’t help it, we all have a Phil Spector in us somewhere, and I knew early on that I couldn’t recreate the sparse beauty of Radix’s composition. So I didn’t try, and instead made it my own as much as I could, while still being recognizable and nostalgic.

TRACK 03: SKINNY IN THE DESERT

That long-winded explanation aside, this track is much simpler. This track has a sample in common with WALLY & ME, but this was actually the one I came up with first. I took that sample from “With This Love” by Peter Gabriel, from the Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack. Despite how much of a jaded marxist I’ve become regarding cinema, that movie is always going to be important to me for a lot of different reasons. Gabriel’s soundtrack is among them, and I sped/pitched it up here because I thought the melody would serve well as a kind of BGM if accompanied by something else. I settled on 2 little built-in percussion samples from ableton and then tweaked them to sound more syncopated, and have some more motion with that tambourine sound. Very fake middle eastern, which is the vibe I was going for–you could say it was inspired by the movie!

Of course, there is another track you may be able to hear. Indeed this is only a 4-track song, but that last track is another interesting sample. I wanted some more low end in there to make it sound adequately spacious, and for some reason I freely associated the bass drum I was using with “Hello Skinny” by The Residents. This is a funny but also quite eerie song, and out of context it does just sound like unintelligible rumbling. The fact that it had a clarinet sound in it that worked well with Peter Gabriel’s oboe sound was a confluence of random genius that I couldn’t pass up. So I spliced them together and synced them up, resulting in what you hear now. Peter Gabriel is a known influence on me, but The Residents are a band I still only know a little about, yet I’m coming to understand the heft of their influence on my music taste from the shadows.

TRACK 04: FAMILY PORTRAIT

This song is dead simple, and actually quite old. These 3 songs at the back of CAREFUL, ICARUS… are among the first I ever made, remixed and reorganized into vague likeability. This song in particular was from my earliest proposed work, MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, a concept album I condensed into a single track and never finished because working on large projects for too long was kind of killing me in the whole “actually releasing music” department. This song is meant to evoke the famous image of the same name, and as such is meant to be quite wholesome while also being rather simple. I wanted it to be a bit more overwhelming at first, but I liked the little MPE organ I was using too much. That dingy sound is pleasing to me. Every sound you hear is just one MPE organ layered a bunch of times on top of itself at different locations in between the channels, except half of them are the chords you hear the whole time and half of them are the low accompaniment at the end. So, all 8 tracks are being used! Economized space! This is a very straightforward song, and it sounds a lot like it could’ve been on ISSERLEY.

TRACK 05: BACKGROUND

Old as sin and also “economized,” but there’s not much going on. Ableton’s default clav sound is really fun to me, so I made a basic melody (no idea where my inspiration came from, I wrote this like 2 years ago) and then tried to make it sound trippy. Ages ago I left it that, unsure of why I even did it. But then, as I learned how the fuck drums work for some of my first releases, I went back and added a plodding, heavy drum track that feels hypnotic like the rest of the song. I don’t know what you could use this for and there are no real samples in it, and only 2 tracks. But I just find it cute. What do you think you could do with this? Let me know if you find something.

TRACK 06: EVIL JAZZ

Now here’s an evil one! Apt listeners will be able to tell that somewhere in this hideous cacophony is the song “Fairies Wear Boots” by Black Sabbath, which is indeed what this began as. I was transposing that song into a basic piano midi thing just for fun, but something about fucking it up and syncopating it woke something up in me. I changed the piano to a warbly ragtime kind of deal and then split the song into a low and high end, which aren’t exactly the same. The low end moves a little more while the high end stays sort of recognizable, and then there are those little breakdowns where they do COMPLETELY different things and it explodes. It was fun as a writing exercise to just “noodle around” except on a midi controller, and the way it seems to fall apart then come back together is pure jazz class. Not that I’m really a jazz guy…which is why this is evil! Chromatics and silly, blown-out drums underneath. This song and SKINNY IN THE DESERT both sharply end because they are intended to loop, which as far as I know they do.

WALLY & ME

Here is a song that has some depth to talk about, in a way, but I will put this here now: if you only listened to this on youtube, go give me bass boosted version on soundcloud a shot. I think I made it sound a little too thin on the official release…

Here, we see the second song with the Peter Gabriel sample in it, yet sped up even more and with some epic House beats underneath. Sort of. I may have bit off more than I could chew here, because there are a lot of different samples at different audio qualities going on. It was a bitch to mix this song, but I eventually thought it sounded kind of cool. Mostly because I’m letting someone else’s fuckin music do a lot of heavy lifting; Admiralhippie’s original song that I chopped up and sprinkled on here is making up not only the mid component, but also all that spacious, footwork-ass drum sound up high in the mix. I wanted the Peter Gabriel song to kind of take the lead, but it often felt a little murky against all the percussion going on. I eventually settled on giving 2 tracks each to these samples, and mixing them differently/spacing them out in the channels to try to create a sort of surround sound effect. Right in the center is the oboe lead, and on the outside is The Vig, but to keep the center from sounding weak I also developed a bassline to keep things moving forward.

This bass is a pile of various SurgeXT wavetables with an 808 sub underneath, and the lead is sidechained to it to help keep it a bit clearer. My original idea was to have this bassline literally be a sample of “Voices Inside My Head” by The Police, but again–the competing audio qualities of my shitty rips were making this impossible to listen to. We got technical limitations here people. Instead, a similar bassline came into my head while thinking of a replacement: this 20 year old live clip of Les Claypool –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0EmTvgUILQ Now, don’t ask me why or how this came into my head, but it did. I transposed it loosely and twiddled around some synths until I had a sound that was distinguishable from The Vig, which is what you hear now. This bassline itself has those giant kick drums sidechained to it like everything else in the mix, to keep them as heavy as possible. We’re at 6 tracks now, and the last 2 in yet ANOTHER full-fledged 8-track song are the cymbals, which are processed 707 cymbals that pan around as they go off. I sort of don’t like them.

I like the heaviness of this song, but there is a murkiness that is lowkey unintentional. I have made plenty of techno by now, but my commitment to the basic juxtaposition of the 2 samples you hear ended up leaning this in a far more modern direction, which I don’t necessarily have the brain cells for. Listen to both versions, and let me know if either of them sound like actual music!