Post by ashcatlt on Feb 23, 2016 15:17:19 GMT -5
Not to spam too much, but I know there are a couple fans around, and I'm definitely interested in talking about tips and techniques if anybody wants to know more about how this happened.
Today is the release day for Lorenzo's Tractor's new album Blood is Cheap. You can stream it for free or buy it for not much and get several printable poster-sized images with it.
This I think is a pretty noticeable contrast to the last couple of albums. They were pretty heavily orchestrated with a lot of layers landing somewhere between shoegaze and industrial. For this one, I made a deliberate shift toward more stripped-down, straight forward arrangements. Part of it is to capture something more like our actual live shows. Part of it came from playing in my Big Black cover band. Part of it comes from spending the last year in mosh pits in dark basements subjected to all manner of hardcore, punk, metal, and noise. Also, I wanted to pay some homage to that post-punk/no wave/noise rock chunk of my influences.
So I decided this was going to be exactly one guitar and one bass. In fact, all of the guitar tracks on this album are tracked on one guitar - my Xavier hybrid offset tele thing - and one pickup position - Bridge in local parallel. One track per song. From there it usually gets split out to several different pedal/amp (mostly VSTs) combinations. While these are different on each song, it was most commonly an AC30, a JC120, and some high gain thing - an Orange, Marshall or Mesa. A few of them are run back out through my pedal board for some fun with feedback. All of the string feedback is real - for most of them I ran a separate out with just my guitar during tracking and plugged it into a Roland keyboard amp and cranked it.
The bass tracks are a bit more diverse. I played bass on all but "In Your Arm" and "Blood is Cheap" where Luke played his Yamaha, but I switched back and forth between my full-scale low-tuned bass and my short-scale, which I had tuned to standard for that sloppy, rattling string thing. As a nod to Steve Albini, I played all of my parts (guitar and bass) with a Fender brand heavy steel pick. Luke used a purple Dunlop because I insisted he not use his fingers.
The first five of these songs actually borrow from and/or almost parody some of the songs we used to play in Circadian Nations, and most of them use at least some "borrowed" words as lyrics. Most are actually just cutups of things I found on the internet, with more or less manipulation on my part. The title track is almost a true story, and is mostly original but steals a couple lines from a couple Retribution Gospel Choir songs. Elsewhere, you might find some Skeeter Davis or Petty. "Fine" is the only one that is one hundred percent original vocal-wise, and is a true story.
All of the songs were actually performed front to back, with very minimal comping between only a couple of takes. Well, except "Falling Together". For this one, I recorded myself playing each string on both bass and guitar exactly once. Cut them up, stacked them on top of each other to create a chord. Then I reversed all of that, and applied an infinite repeating delay to each. Each of those delays was set to a different prime number multiple of the beat. I rendered all ten tracks out a ways, then reversed them back the other way so that they all converge on that one hit. Then I did the vocals and lined them up with the end and edited the beginning of each track to an appropriate length.
An important part of the thing was to end up with something we could actually do live. To that end, all of the synth parts are either directly generated from the other instruments (via my GK3A>GI10) or are free running sequences somehow modulated by guitar or bass. This is also true for many of the drums on the album, but I did actually play a lot of them in via the GK3A as drums alone. I wasn't trying to fool anybody, but I don't think I could get any of the drummers I know to play this kind of crap, so...
Today is the release day for Lorenzo's Tractor's new album Blood is Cheap. You can stream it for free or buy it for not much and get several printable poster-sized images with it.
This I think is a pretty noticeable contrast to the last couple of albums. They were pretty heavily orchestrated with a lot of layers landing somewhere between shoegaze and industrial. For this one, I made a deliberate shift toward more stripped-down, straight forward arrangements. Part of it is to capture something more like our actual live shows. Part of it came from playing in my Big Black cover band. Part of it comes from spending the last year in mosh pits in dark basements subjected to all manner of hardcore, punk, metal, and noise. Also, I wanted to pay some homage to that post-punk/no wave/noise rock chunk of my influences.
So I decided this was going to be exactly one guitar and one bass. In fact, all of the guitar tracks on this album are tracked on one guitar - my Xavier hybrid offset tele thing - and one pickup position - Bridge in local parallel. One track per song. From there it usually gets split out to several different pedal/amp (mostly VSTs) combinations. While these are different on each song, it was most commonly an AC30, a JC120, and some high gain thing - an Orange, Marshall or Mesa. A few of them are run back out through my pedal board for some fun with feedback. All of the string feedback is real - for most of them I ran a separate out with just my guitar during tracking and plugged it into a Roland keyboard amp and cranked it.
The bass tracks are a bit more diverse. I played bass on all but "In Your Arm" and "Blood is Cheap" where Luke played his Yamaha, but I switched back and forth between my full-scale low-tuned bass and my short-scale, which I had tuned to standard for that sloppy, rattling string thing. As a nod to Steve Albini, I played all of my parts (guitar and bass) with a Fender brand heavy steel pick. Luke used a purple Dunlop because I insisted he not use his fingers.
The first five of these songs actually borrow from and/or almost parody some of the songs we used to play in Circadian Nations, and most of them use at least some "borrowed" words as lyrics. Most are actually just cutups of things I found on the internet, with more or less manipulation on my part. The title track is almost a true story, and is mostly original but steals a couple lines from a couple Retribution Gospel Choir songs. Elsewhere, you might find some Skeeter Davis or Petty. "Fine" is the only one that is one hundred percent original vocal-wise, and is a true story.
All of the songs were actually performed front to back, with very minimal comping between only a couple of takes. Well, except "Falling Together". For this one, I recorded myself playing each string on both bass and guitar exactly once. Cut them up, stacked them on top of each other to create a chord. Then I reversed all of that, and applied an infinite repeating delay to each. Each of those delays was set to a different prime number multiple of the beat. I rendered all ten tracks out a ways, then reversed them back the other way so that they all converge on that one hit. Then I did the vocals and lined them up with the end and edited the beginning of each track to an appropriate length.
An important part of the thing was to end up with something we could actually do live. To that end, all of the synth parts are either directly generated from the other instruments (via my GK3A>GI10) or are free running sequences somehow modulated by guitar or bass. This is also true for many of the drums on the album, but I did actually play a lot of them in via the GK3A as drums alone. I wasn't trying to fool anybody, but I don't think I could get any of the drummers I know to play this kind of crap, so...
), so the timing is kind of tight where it's supposed to be. It's also very much bass forward, which is almost cheating when you're looking for that big sound.
