Post by ashcatlt on Mar 14, 2015 20:42:52 GMT -5
Well, I've done it again. Not completely sure how I survived it, but I managed to release another album before its drop dead date. haydukej says it sounds more "mature". IDK about that, really. I mean, I've been doing this for 25 years and to me this sounds and feels a lot like the first few albums we recorded in the early 90s. Granted, all of those recordings were lost before the internet became a viable archive option, and this is a bit of a departure from the other things on my bandcamp page.
Part of that is the fact that these are practically the first actual songs with words that I've written on purpose for Lorenzo's Tractor since like 1995. Well, there are two others, one was 2000 ("No Words" - tracked in the cab of my semi and available on YouTube) and the other was just released last year ("Not a Mirror" from What I Think I Am)... There are a few other vocal songs that we've released in that time span, but they were either mostly cut-ups or just drunken rambling.
It's also the first full-length studio album that we've released since 1993 that has anybody other than me actually playing instruments. What I Think... had guest vocals, Sunless Port had a bonus track with Luke playing bass, and we've released live songs, singles, and EPs with other folks on them, but for this one I insisted on having at least one other person play somedarnthing on every track. It turned out there are at least two on each. My father Armond played every organ on the album and is on all but one of the tracks. I got a couple other friends to add guitar and keys. I even did my second online collaboration (the thing we did here being the first) with a dude who played harmonica through circuit-bent pedals and a tube amp on the last song. I had the goal to not play any of the "main" bass parts on this album, but Luke is married with children and my schedule is all screwey, so we couldn't schedule enough sessions. He did his damage to two of the tracks, though.
A few other milestones were passed on this album, as well:
1) Our first Reaper-only album. I've been using it for years now, but the last couple albums were originally tracked to Sonar and then ported over.
B) Our first full album with only ITB amp sims. Every guitar and bass was recorded direct to a line input from a pedal. In fact most of the time that pedal was bypassed. The vast majority of the effects you hear on these guitars are VST or almost more likely JS plugins that I've hacked together myself.
Okay, so before I get much further into geeky details, click the picture to stream the five tracks of the actual album for free.
I did kind of set out to put together a set of songs I could bust out at an open mic and pull off on the house acoustic, be a little happier with my hybrid Xavier and AC4, really start to flesh out with my pedalboard, and get really weird with if I ever actually end up on big stage with a full band. In fact, that's more or less exactly how most of these came together.
I had fun playing with bending more traditional structures to my will. The entire album is pretty strictly diatonic in that I always pretty much pick a key and stick to it. There are no color tones or passing notes. Never an accidental on my scores. Mistakes here and there maybe... But then, it's almost all modal also. There are only very rare glimpses of the actual key center in any of these arrangements.
"the Next One" is in D Dorian, so C major or A minor, but stuck around the ii. But I tried to play a lot of my leads as though it were C or F. The "my guitar" part that starts acting like it's playing a song when I start "singin" is my mini-Strat, strung with EQ 11s and tuned up to A>A. I didn't document the switch positions, but it was probably either the middle HB in local series or the N*B. I literally hold that Am7 shape (sounding as Dm7) until the big finale at the end where it goes like C5, A5, G5 with a bunch of unrelated open notes clanging around. The lower, blown out guitar that adds weight to that section is my Douglas baritone, playing a G5 shape for...what?...eight minutes?
It's supposed to come across like the beginning of a live set where everybody's just plugging in and noodling around, maybe working toward a soundcheck, and then suddenly find out they're supposed to be playing some song now. The bassist (me playing the low C and D on my full scale Cort bass strung B-D) is the only one on stage who's ever seen the set list. A couple of them have heard the thing before... My favorite part is when the bassist finally gives up trying to drag the rest of the band into the song and just goes and funks out for a bit, and then the band goes with them, which just gets us all further away from where we were supposed to be going.
This is one of the very few places where there are actual pedal effects. I "re-amped" the DI>delay on my noodly guitar (the hybrid, maybe the bridge in local series) through my pedal board and mixed the return from that back in with the the DI>delay (that's my JS pedal delay, BTW) and then ran that mix through my default "British Class A" PodFarm model. Then I played with the knobs on the feedback oscillator that I call my pedalboard in real time using techniques I've picked up over the couple years we've been doing the Noise Rituals.
The drums on this one started as a loop of a drum fill from the Twisted Kit EZKit played I think on the Nashville kit, but also played by this strange freeware plug that emulates some obscure punch-card operated drum machine. I have no idea how the thing is supposed to work! Some notes tell it to play a drum sound. Some notes tell it to start playing its sequence. I think some tell it to change programs. I just send it stuff and embrace the way it spazzes out. So the volume of that thing before it hits the bass amp through which it's running as well as the velocity of the midi notes (not the volume of the audio, big difference) going to Superior Drummer are modulated by the volume enevelope of various other elements in the mix. The envelope is kind of slow and loose, but it does cause the drums to follow the dynamics of the band in a very natural way. Behind all of that, I've also mapped the MIDI notes from both of the keyboardists to kits of their own, which goes from hilarious visions of the f-ing drummer at sound check to some really interesting accents and fills. What's most amazing is that the B3 model that my dad was using is (of course) not velocity sensitive, but the keyboard was sending different velocities for each hit, and it actually follows the dynamics of the mix in general. He hits the thing harder even though it ain't gonna get no louder.
"Faded" is one of my favorites. The riff that builds up through the intro and comes back after the second verse was something I had cut out of "Great Big Mine" for What I Think... but I kind of dig it, so it I transposed it up to Em. It's really just spelling out Em7, with that G to A or A to G thing at the end. Of course, the song is actually in Am, but the structure of the verses feels to me like it should be iv i iv v in Em, until you get to the B and find out it's diminished.
The lead section of this turned out exactly the way I hoped. Both of my guitar go through the JS plug I made of my Diseased Dire Rat. The "main" one has this in parallel before the amp, which turns out to act very much like TubeScreamer. The other one that fades in on the second time through it's full-series, full-out Rat, except I think I flipped the "flip bottom" switch which makes it a full-wave rectifier much like a lot of octave fuzz boxes. All of the delay on the "my guitar" track is actually another parallel line from the dry DI track running through my pedal delay plug and then into an amp of its own. The main track had to be an AC30, but I think the delay was an AC15 with some spring reverb. In this case, it actually sits a bit left of center, while the big amp is over to the right.
All of the organs on the album are from one plugin whose name I'll have to fill in later. This of course allowed me to do all kinds of horrible things to the organ, like in this one I split the signal out to a kind of driven Leslie a la everybody and a Marshall half-stack a la John Lord, and mix between them as necessary.
Luke played the bass on this. I love what he plays, but I had real trouble getting it to sit in the mix where I'd like. I think I used the plugin version of the 1337Drive pedal I made for him to add a bit of edge, and ran it through something like an SVT, but it I couldn't get any bite out of this at all. Much of this is that he is afraid of his bridge pickup because it buzzes like crazy, especially through heavy distortion and compression. I didn't have these guys for long, and didn't want to kill the mood by fiddling for too long. I took what I got and was very happy to have it.
The basics for this were, in fact, tracked live with Luke and Armond and I sitting in the same room. Ran through it 3 times and tried not to mess up in the same spot twice. Some of the drums in this come from the MIDI I captured off of various guitar takes via my GK-3A>GI-10. The parts that sound more like traditional drums were also played on the guitar, but on purpose. I think I may have triggered a low-end drum like a cajon or something off the bass and mixed it way down in there somewhere.
Now that I think of it, it was actually two different live sessions. I had Luke and Harrison (the kid that smashed the guitar last weekend) over one day and we all jammed around on top of the intro. This is the one other place on the album with actual pedals. We all plugged through our full pedal boards and ran through it like 4 times, doing completely different things each time. All of those takes are actually in there, mostly acting like a relatively harmnonic noise floor.
"Faded" ends with what I call an extended noise epilogue. It's kind of a Lorenzian cliche nowadays. A lot of times in the past it happened because the track itself (like "When Things Go Black" from Sunless Port) had run out of ideas, but wasn't as long as I wanted it to be, so I just take the crappy part at the end and make it worse. In this case, though, there's a lot of pretty weird abstract stuff happening throughout the whole thing but mixed way down. Like I said "harmonic noise floor". Other people might call them pads or something. But I wanted to give those things a chance to speak a bit. Of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and I wanted to obscure it a bit, so I did all kinds of horrible things to many of the tracks. Among other things, the main guitar loop is being ring modulated against its own delay double from a couple beats back.
I did re-amp the entire mix back through the monophonic input on the front of the GI-10 and feed that to a kind of wooden xylophone thing (and some delay). It ends up sounding like wind chimes or something that is almost trying to play along. We call it Mr Rogers because when you use it piano, it's like the way the piano follows people around in his neighborhood. We used to do it live with a real microphone plugged into the thing, but I need that for my guitar now. I have a plan to get Mr Rogers and Luke both through the thing very soon. I don't absolutely need the MIDI from my 1 and 2 strings... But it was easier in this case just to take the line out to the hole on the front of the thing than try to find a mic and an XLR>1/4 cable, and...
The only microphones on this thing were the vocals. Everything else is either VST or DI guitar/bass. I did run my AC4 in parallel a couple of times when I had the chance to really crank it, but that introduces a ground loop that haven't been able to get around. The passive DI helps that, but causes other noise issues by attenuating the already kind of low signal even further into the noise floor. But I bought a couple of those cheap things that you can use to make a plastic cup into a speaker and found out that I can just rip the transducer out, solder a cable to it, and plug it into my headphone amp. Run an individual output from the computer (I have 8) to that channel's Aux override input and stick the thing to my guitar with double-sided carpet tape and it starts to act like it's in the room with a relatively loud amplifier. In fact, I have two, each on its own 1/4" TS cable, coupled to a TRS>Dual TS "insert" cable plugged into a dedicated channel on my headphone amp now. You can do things like compress or distort just that send. The most important part of getting a decent response on this for me is being able to vary the distance and angle of the guitar itself. I have done that with an expression pedal, but I find that usually all it needs is a randomly-modulated all-pass filter. The random rate is very slow and well-smoothed, so it's very much like what would happen as you sway and turn and move back and forth while playing.
I used those things all over the title track. In this case, we weren't really shooting for all out howling feedback, just a little something extra in our sustain. You probably can't tell.
The lyrics for "All You Hear" start off with kind of the same joke from "the Next One", but then diverge in a noticeably different direction. The chord progression plays much the same game as "Faded". The instrumental theme that goes where the choruses probably should is definitely in C - C G Em Am - I a pretty standard I V iii vi thing (except that "my guitar" actually arpegiates Am - E C A - over the C), but the verses again sound a whole lot like a blues-type thing in Em - Em Am Em... except when you'd expect to go to Bm (and find out it's diminished) we actual resolve back to the real key center on C.
My main guitar (plays the main theme, rhythm panned left in the verses) on this one is the hybrid again. Don't really remember which pickup. The other rhythm guitar (to the right) is my friend Brandon who came over and played his Epiphone Dot. I think I recall noting that he was using his bridge HB. We recorded several takes, and toward the end as things get louder you end up hearing more and more of them, to the point where I think there's three of each of us through different amps and panned all over.
The noodly "lead" guitar is my Nashville-tuned Tele. The wah is a PodFarm model of a Vox wah. To control it, I took an Ernie Ball VPJunior and connected it to the expression input of my GI10 via another insert cable (tip to output, ring to input). This sends CC11 to the Reaper, which I then mapped to the position control of the wah. A darn sight more comfortable and smooth than the plastic "expression pedal" that says Moog on it.
This one has my dad playing organ, and my friend Tobin playing piano and some of the synths. The toy piano, the plinkystringythingy, and the really annoying thing are were actually played on purpose via the GK3A, but then there's also an electric piano, a couple low droney things, and all of the drums that were recorded kind of incidentally as I played various takes, most of which don't actually exist in the final mix. There is a kick drum in there triggered off of the bass, and the relatively constant hat was actually just the click track, but I humanized the timing a little, modulated the velocity with my main guitar's dry signal and ran it through a delay.
The "scream" part is the same progression in C, but I told everybody that it was twice as fast but twice as long. This turns out to be tough on a whole lot of pretty darn good musicians. Especially since I'm sliding octaves around to chord tones other than the tonic. And there's so much noise it's almost impossible to count anything. Play it a few times, try not to mess up in the same place twice, if you have to loop something, try for the longest possible loop.
The angry "manifesto" section goes back to acting like Em - Em G Em Bdim...
The part where it gets weird when I say "noise" was actually just one measure of us hitting that Bdim chord (I almost always cheat on that and play Bm7no5) and then I used Reaper's native split and stretch features each track's dry audio (before any pedals or amps or whatever) and also took a bunch of the scratch tracks over to their own session to create a whole 8 minute piece of experimental noise that stands on its own and comes as a bonus track with the download just to mix in under that four measure freakout.
...Em G.
Don't know if you noticed, but the whole thing is in 3/4 time. The instrumental sections are played more or less like a waltz, while the verses almost act like the quarters are eighth note triplets in a sort of blues shuffle. At this point, though, hanging on that climactic G, the V of the actual key, we resolve to the C and are now playing in 4/4, and the progression has changed now to an even more common pattern - C G Am F. It's "With or Without You", but it's also my hit single from 95 "It only hurts if you let it" which one of those horrible bands that I call Creed stole. I didn't sue them. Rights Are Lies! This is kind of an inside joke, since this is always my most requested song. No matter how powerful and inspired a performance we put on through the rest of the show, everybody's just waiting to hear us sing their favorite song.
Sorry, this is just a tease. We fade to noise because it runs out of ideas, but since we just had an extended noise epilogue, we fade it short. Things are about to get much weirder anyway.
"Back to Snow" was written as a live jam that actually spanned three days. John and Tara and I played one day. He got stuck on that droning 5 measure thing that spells out Edim - single notes E G E Bb Bb - and I noodled around in F and played with my pedals. The next day Luke came in and we added abstract noise to that. Then I came back the next day and ad libbed the vocals.
Course, that's not what you're hearing here. I really wasn't sure that I could improve on that original live thing. I'm not sure I did. I did, however, figure out a way to pull it off on the house acoustic at the local open mic. I basically just play relatively uncomfortable chords based on those single notes - Em7no5 (7 5 7 from the A) Edim/G (10 8 9) Em7no5 and Bb/D (5 3 3) - except in the "chorus" where I substitute C/E (5 3 3) over the first three notes (E G E) and Gm/D (5 5 3) over the Bb.
Except that's actually three guitars. I am actually the kind of nutz that will play exactly one string at time to build a three note chord part. They each play different rhythms, and in the chorus sections I'm actually playing complimentary arpeggios designed so that none of them are ever playing the same note at the same time. I probably could have (actually, do, live) played that all at once, but then I wouldn't have been able to send each string to a different delay. I have a solution to that in the works (connected to the Mr Rogers fix) but it really still wouldn't have been the same in the choruses. There are three different delays, and each of the three guitar tracks has a send to each of those. Those sends are all modulated so that each string is cross-fading into each delay at different rates. Sometimes they do all end up coming through one, sometimes through several at a time. It's good fun. All six of those tracks come before the amplifier, which was of course the AC30.
I couldn't justify asking John to come all the way to my place to play four notes for twenty minutes, so I did it myself. Course, John's a left who has always played right-handed guitars. It makes a difference. I don't have the dexterity to just "swap hands" on any of my standard guitars, but I do have a left-handed Lotus Strat copy that I keep around for exactly these occasions. I used the bridge pickup. It's not exactly what we would have gotten off his Tele, but it's close enough for rock and...whatever the heck this is... This track is extremely dynamic, and pounding into some Marshall something. The parts where it sounds clean are just barely breathing on the strings.
I played both the Cort low-strung bass and the ugly old short scale tuned up to A on this one, and neither of them really follow the rest of the song most of the time. The low bass pretty much plays the basic 5 measure pattern, only it holds each like four times as long, so that it only comes back into sync every however many measures. The high bass loops on four, refusing to hold that Bb for two measures in a row until we all meet back at the chorus. These things makes the harmony wander in ways that I consider interesting, if a bit unsettling.
The organ tone on this was another thing I don't think I could have done with a real Hammond. I think it comes across like the organ music on an old time radio show. It's kind of creepy. IIRC, there are two copies of the same MIDI data hitting two B3 modules which have some of their draw bars modulating randomly. Each of those actually goes through something like a Deluxe Reverb (and cab and SM57) before the Leslie, and each Leslie is spinning at a different rate, and I think there's some automated crossfading between the two.
The big pounding tom is one of those drum fills with its velocity modulated by the low bass. The hat is modulated by the "John's guitar" track, and each of my single string tracks was triggering a different drum in a rather imperfect manner.
I think that the way it's so simple and repetitive yet different every time manages to convey that feeling of driving for days on the freeway and ending up back where you started.
Part of that is the fact that these are practically the first actual songs with words that I've written on purpose for Lorenzo's Tractor since like 1995. Well, there are two others, one was 2000 ("No Words" - tracked in the cab of my semi and available on YouTube) and the other was just released last year ("Not a Mirror" from What I Think I Am)... There are a few other vocal songs that we've released in that time span, but they were either mostly cut-ups or just drunken rambling.
It's also the first full-length studio album that we've released since 1993 that has anybody other than me actually playing instruments. What I Think... had guest vocals, Sunless Port had a bonus track with Luke playing bass, and we've released live songs, singles, and EPs with other folks on them, but for this one I insisted on having at least one other person play somedarnthing on every track. It turned out there are at least two on each. My father Armond played every organ on the album and is on all but one of the tracks. I got a couple other friends to add guitar and keys. I even did my second online collaboration (the thing we did here being the first) with a dude who played harmonica through circuit-bent pedals and a tube amp on the last song. I had the goal to not play any of the "main" bass parts on this album, but Luke is married with children and my schedule is all screwey, so we couldn't schedule enough sessions. He did his damage to two of the tracks, though.
A few other milestones were passed on this album, as well:
1) Our first Reaper-only album. I've been using it for years now, but the last couple albums were originally tracked to Sonar and then ported over.
B) Our first full album with only ITB amp sims. Every guitar and bass was recorded direct to a line input from a pedal. In fact most of the time that pedal was bypassed. The vast majority of the effects you hear on these guitars are VST or almost more likely JS plugins that I've hacked together myself.
Okay, so before I get much further into geeky details, click the picture to stream the five tracks of the actual album for free.
I did kind of set out to put together a set of songs I could bust out at an open mic and pull off on the house acoustic, be a little happier with my hybrid Xavier and AC4, really start to flesh out with my pedalboard, and get really weird with if I ever actually end up on big stage with a full band. In fact, that's more or less exactly how most of these came together.
I had fun playing with bending more traditional structures to my will. The entire album is pretty strictly diatonic in that I always pretty much pick a key and stick to it. There are no color tones or passing notes. Never an accidental on my scores. Mistakes here and there maybe... But then, it's almost all modal also. There are only very rare glimpses of the actual key center in any of these arrangements.
"the Next One" is in D Dorian, so C major or A minor, but stuck around the ii. But I tried to play a lot of my leads as though it were C or F. The "my guitar" part that starts acting like it's playing a song when I start "singin" is my mini-Strat, strung with EQ 11s and tuned up to A>A. I didn't document the switch positions, but it was probably either the middle HB in local series or the N*B. I literally hold that Am7 shape (sounding as Dm7) until the big finale at the end where it goes like C5, A5, G5 with a bunch of unrelated open notes clanging around. The lower, blown out guitar that adds weight to that section is my Douglas baritone, playing a G5 shape for...what?...eight minutes?
It's supposed to come across like the beginning of a live set where everybody's just plugging in and noodling around, maybe working toward a soundcheck, and then suddenly find out they're supposed to be playing some song now. The bassist (me playing the low C and D on my full scale Cort bass strung B-D) is the only one on stage who's ever seen the set list. A couple of them have heard the thing before... My favorite part is when the bassist finally gives up trying to drag the rest of the band into the song and just goes and funks out for a bit, and then the band goes with them, which just gets us all further away from where we were supposed to be going.
This is one of the very few places where there are actual pedal effects. I "re-amped" the DI>delay on my noodly guitar (the hybrid, maybe the bridge in local series) through my pedal board and mixed the return from that back in with the the DI>delay (that's my JS pedal delay, BTW) and then ran that mix through my default "British Class A" PodFarm model. Then I played with the knobs on the feedback oscillator that I call my pedalboard in real time using techniques I've picked up over the couple years we've been doing the Noise Rituals.
The drums on this one started as a loop of a drum fill from the Twisted Kit EZKit played I think on the Nashville kit, but also played by this strange freeware plug that emulates some obscure punch-card operated drum machine. I have no idea how the thing is supposed to work! Some notes tell it to play a drum sound. Some notes tell it to start playing its sequence. I think some tell it to change programs. I just send it stuff and embrace the way it spazzes out. So the volume of that thing before it hits the bass amp through which it's running as well as the velocity of the midi notes (not the volume of the audio, big difference) going to Superior Drummer are modulated by the volume enevelope of various other elements in the mix. The envelope is kind of slow and loose, but it does cause the drums to follow the dynamics of the band in a very natural way. Behind all of that, I've also mapped the MIDI notes from both of the keyboardists to kits of their own, which goes from hilarious visions of the f-ing drummer at sound check to some really interesting accents and fills. What's most amazing is that the B3 model that my dad was using is (of course) not velocity sensitive, but the keyboard was sending different velocities for each hit, and it actually follows the dynamics of the mix in general. He hits the thing harder even though it ain't gonna get no louder.
"Faded" is one of my favorites. The riff that builds up through the intro and comes back after the second verse was something I had cut out of "Great Big Mine" for What I Think... but I kind of dig it, so it I transposed it up to Em. It's really just spelling out Em7, with that G to A or A to G thing at the end. Of course, the song is actually in Am, but the structure of the verses feels to me like it should be iv i iv v in Em, until you get to the B and find out it's diminished.
The lead section of this turned out exactly the way I hoped. Both of my guitar go through the JS plug I made of my Diseased Dire Rat. The "main" one has this in parallel before the amp, which turns out to act very much like TubeScreamer. The other one that fades in on the second time through it's full-series, full-out Rat, except I think I flipped the "flip bottom" switch which makes it a full-wave rectifier much like a lot of octave fuzz boxes. All of the delay on the "my guitar" track is actually another parallel line from the dry DI track running through my pedal delay plug and then into an amp of its own. The main track had to be an AC30, but I think the delay was an AC15 with some spring reverb. In this case, it actually sits a bit left of center, while the big amp is over to the right.
All of the organs on the album are from one plugin whose name I'll have to fill in later. This of course allowed me to do all kinds of horrible things to the organ, like in this one I split the signal out to a kind of driven Leslie a la everybody and a Marshall half-stack a la John Lord, and mix between them as necessary.
Luke played the bass on this. I love what he plays, but I had real trouble getting it to sit in the mix where I'd like. I think I used the plugin version of the 1337Drive pedal I made for him to add a bit of edge, and ran it through something like an SVT, but it I couldn't get any bite out of this at all. Much of this is that he is afraid of his bridge pickup because it buzzes like crazy, especially through heavy distortion and compression. I didn't have these guys for long, and didn't want to kill the mood by fiddling for too long. I took what I got and was very happy to have it.
The basics for this were, in fact, tracked live with Luke and Armond and I sitting in the same room. Ran through it 3 times and tried not to mess up in the same spot twice. Some of the drums in this come from the MIDI I captured off of various guitar takes via my GK-3A>GI-10. The parts that sound more like traditional drums were also played on the guitar, but on purpose. I think I may have triggered a low-end drum like a cajon or something off the bass and mixed it way down in there somewhere.
Now that I think of it, it was actually two different live sessions. I had Luke and Harrison (the kid that smashed the guitar last weekend) over one day and we all jammed around on top of the intro. This is the one other place on the album with actual pedals. We all plugged through our full pedal boards and ran through it like 4 times, doing completely different things each time. All of those takes are actually in there, mostly acting like a relatively harmnonic noise floor.
"Faded" ends with what I call an extended noise epilogue. It's kind of a Lorenzian cliche nowadays. A lot of times in the past it happened because the track itself (like "When Things Go Black" from Sunless Port) had run out of ideas, but wasn't as long as I wanted it to be, so I just take the crappy part at the end and make it worse. In this case, though, there's a lot of pretty weird abstract stuff happening throughout the whole thing but mixed way down. Like I said "harmonic noise floor". Other people might call them pads or something. But I wanted to give those things a chance to speak a bit. Of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and I wanted to obscure it a bit, so I did all kinds of horrible things to many of the tracks. Among other things, the main guitar loop is being ring modulated against its own delay double from a couple beats back.
I did re-amp the entire mix back through the monophonic input on the front of the GI-10 and feed that to a kind of wooden xylophone thing (and some delay). It ends up sounding like wind chimes or something that is almost trying to play along. We call it Mr Rogers because when you use it piano, it's like the way the piano follows people around in his neighborhood. We used to do it live with a real microphone plugged into the thing, but I need that for my guitar now. I have a plan to get Mr Rogers and Luke both through the thing very soon. I don't absolutely need the MIDI from my 1 and 2 strings... But it was easier in this case just to take the line out to the hole on the front of the thing than try to find a mic and an XLR>1/4 cable, and...
The only microphones on this thing were the vocals. Everything else is either VST or DI guitar/bass. I did run my AC4 in parallel a couple of times when I had the chance to really crank it, but that introduces a ground loop that haven't been able to get around. The passive DI helps that, but causes other noise issues by attenuating the already kind of low signal even further into the noise floor. But I bought a couple of those cheap things that you can use to make a plastic cup into a speaker and found out that I can just rip the transducer out, solder a cable to it, and plug it into my headphone amp. Run an individual output from the computer (I have 8) to that channel's Aux override input and stick the thing to my guitar with double-sided carpet tape and it starts to act like it's in the room with a relatively loud amplifier. In fact, I have two, each on its own 1/4" TS cable, coupled to a TRS>Dual TS "insert" cable plugged into a dedicated channel on my headphone amp now. You can do things like compress or distort just that send. The most important part of getting a decent response on this for me is being able to vary the distance and angle of the guitar itself. I have done that with an expression pedal, but I find that usually all it needs is a randomly-modulated all-pass filter. The random rate is very slow and well-smoothed, so it's very much like what would happen as you sway and turn and move back and forth while playing.
I used those things all over the title track. In this case, we weren't really shooting for all out howling feedback, just a little something extra in our sustain. You probably can't tell.
The lyrics for "All You Hear" start off with kind of the same joke from "the Next One", but then diverge in a noticeably different direction. The chord progression plays much the same game as "Faded". The instrumental theme that goes where the choruses probably should is definitely in C - C G Em Am - I a pretty standard I V iii vi thing (except that "my guitar" actually arpegiates Am - E C A - over the C), but the verses again sound a whole lot like a blues-type thing in Em - Em Am Em... except when you'd expect to go to Bm (and find out it's diminished) we actual resolve back to the real key center on C.
My main guitar (plays the main theme, rhythm panned left in the verses) on this one is the hybrid again. Don't really remember which pickup. The other rhythm guitar (to the right) is my friend Brandon who came over and played his Epiphone Dot. I think I recall noting that he was using his bridge HB. We recorded several takes, and toward the end as things get louder you end up hearing more and more of them, to the point where I think there's three of each of us through different amps and panned all over.
The noodly "lead" guitar is my Nashville-tuned Tele. The wah is a PodFarm model of a Vox wah. To control it, I took an Ernie Ball VPJunior and connected it to the expression input of my GI10 via another insert cable (tip to output, ring to input). This sends CC11 to the Reaper, which I then mapped to the position control of the wah. A darn sight more comfortable and smooth than the plastic "expression pedal" that says Moog on it.
This one has my dad playing organ, and my friend Tobin playing piano and some of the synths. The toy piano, the plinkystringythingy, and the really annoying thing are were actually played on purpose via the GK3A, but then there's also an electric piano, a couple low droney things, and all of the drums that were recorded kind of incidentally as I played various takes, most of which don't actually exist in the final mix. There is a kick drum in there triggered off of the bass, and the relatively constant hat was actually just the click track, but I humanized the timing a little, modulated the velocity with my main guitar's dry signal and ran it through a delay.
The "scream" part is the same progression in C, but I told everybody that it was twice as fast but twice as long. This turns out to be tough on a whole lot of pretty darn good musicians. Especially since I'm sliding octaves around to chord tones other than the tonic. And there's so much noise it's almost impossible to count anything. Play it a few times, try not to mess up in the same place twice, if you have to loop something, try for the longest possible loop.
The angry "manifesto" section goes back to acting like Em - Em G Em Bdim...
The part where it gets weird when I say "noise" was actually just one measure of us hitting that Bdim chord (I almost always cheat on that and play Bm7no5) and then I used Reaper's native split and stretch features each track's dry audio (before any pedals or amps or whatever) and also took a bunch of the scratch tracks over to their own session to create a whole 8 minute piece of experimental noise that stands on its own and comes as a bonus track with the download just to mix in under that four measure freakout.
...Em G.
Don't know if you noticed, but the whole thing is in 3/4 time. The instrumental sections are played more or less like a waltz, while the verses almost act like the quarters are eighth note triplets in a sort of blues shuffle. At this point, though, hanging on that climactic G, the V of the actual key, we resolve to the C and are now playing in 4/4, and the progression has changed now to an even more common pattern - C G Am F. It's "With or Without You", but it's also my hit single from 95 "It only hurts if you let it" which one of those horrible bands that I call Creed stole. I didn't sue them. Rights Are Lies! This is kind of an inside joke, since this is always my most requested song. No matter how powerful and inspired a performance we put on through the rest of the show, everybody's just waiting to hear us sing their favorite song.
Sorry, this is just a tease. We fade to noise because it runs out of ideas, but since we just had an extended noise epilogue, we fade it short. Things are about to get much weirder anyway.
"Back to Snow" was written as a live jam that actually spanned three days. John and Tara and I played one day. He got stuck on that droning 5 measure thing that spells out Edim - single notes E G E Bb Bb - and I noodled around in F and played with my pedals. The next day Luke came in and we added abstract noise to that. Then I came back the next day and ad libbed the vocals.
Course, that's not what you're hearing here. I really wasn't sure that I could improve on that original live thing. I'm not sure I did. I did, however, figure out a way to pull it off on the house acoustic at the local open mic. I basically just play relatively uncomfortable chords based on those single notes - Em7no5 (7 5 7 from the A) Edim/G (10 8 9) Em7no5 and Bb/D (5 3 3) - except in the "chorus" where I substitute C/E (5 3 3) over the first three notes (E G E) and Gm/D (5 5 3) over the Bb.
Except that's actually three guitars. I am actually the kind of nutz that will play exactly one string at time to build a three note chord part. They each play different rhythms, and in the chorus sections I'm actually playing complimentary arpeggios designed so that none of them are ever playing the same note at the same time. I probably could have (actually, do, live) played that all at once, but then I wouldn't have been able to send each string to a different delay. I have a solution to that in the works (connected to the Mr Rogers fix) but it really still wouldn't have been the same in the choruses. There are three different delays, and each of the three guitar tracks has a send to each of those. Those sends are all modulated so that each string is cross-fading into each delay at different rates. Sometimes they do all end up coming through one, sometimes through several at a time. It's good fun. All six of those tracks come before the amplifier, which was of course the AC30.
I couldn't justify asking John to come all the way to my place to play four notes for twenty minutes, so I did it myself. Course, John's a left who has always played right-handed guitars. It makes a difference. I don't have the dexterity to just "swap hands" on any of my standard guitars, but I do have a left-handed Lotus Strat copy that I keep around for exactly these occasions. I used the bridge pickup. It's not exactly what we would have gotten off his Tele, but it's close enough for rock and...whatever the heck this is... This track is extremely dynamic, and pounding into some Marshall something. The parts where it sounds clean are just barely breathing on the strings.
I played both the Cort low-strung bass and the ugly old short scale tuned up to A on this one, and neither of them really follow the rest of the song most of the time. The low bass pretty much plays the basic 5 measure pattern, only it holds each like four times as long, so that it only comes back into sync every however many measures. The high bass loops on four, refusing to hold that Bb for two measures in a row until we all meet back at the chorus. These things makes the harmony wander in ways that I consider interesting, if a bit unsettling.
The organ tone on this was another thing I don't think I could have done with a real Hammond. I think it comes across like the organ music on an old time radio show. It's kind of creepy. IIRC, there are two copies of the same MIDI data hitting two B3 modules which have some of their draw bars modulating randomly. Each of those actually goes through something like a Deluxe Reverb (and cab and SM57) before the Leslie, and each Leslie is spinning at a different rate, and I think there's some automated crossfading between the two.
The big pounding tom is one of those drum fills with its velocity modulated by the low bass. The hat is modulated by the "John's guitar" track, and each of my single string tracks was triggering a different drum in a rather imperfect manner.
I think that the way it's so simple and repetitive yet different every time manages to convey that feeling of driving for days on the freeway and ending up back where you started.