This Is A Working Title
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Can you successfully combine Typical Manzuma, pop, west-coast-teenage-summer-cars-and-girls-punk, industrial and trance, occurring independently in one song? The answer is no. I tried that yesterday during an epic 16 hour session at the Ugly World. I did make myself laugh a lot while I was recording, but I think it was laughing at the song not with it. I worked for 12 hours on it before Vanessa made her grand entrance at 7pm and suggested keeping a little bit and scrapping the rest. I agreed, and in about 4 hours we'd finished a little song we started writing 4 years ago. Don't give me shit, you know we take our time.
The song I'm talking about is Uncommon Dream. At this point the original title remains but will be fixed. It is so wrong for so many different reasons. Allow me to fill in the gaps. In August of 2001 I'd finished up at the Conservativorium (I quit while I was ahead; they were about to escort me from the building) and was filling in my time by writing children's songs with Julie Walton and writing songs like Fall To Earth, Mantra, A Hand In The Rail and Gentle Sport. The latter we've never recorded, but it does make a cool name for a blog. The other three are on Serpent. This little writing spree also gave birth to Uncommon Dream. Back then it was intended to be the next Edge Of A Cloud, all hopeful and fuzzy, but it didn't cut it. We worked it for so many hours but never found its spot. In mid-2002 we had another go at it, adding a new chorus and rehearsing it for live use. It has never been performed. Jump forward to June 2005 and you find Vanessa and I in the same room the song was written, recording a piano/vocal demo of it hoping that slowing it down would give it the 'thing' it's always needed. That didn't work either.
Another six months added to the song's age has obviously worked a treat. Mature now, vintage even, elderly. When I started yesterday I kept the song's original structure, but altered the darker parts to make them a little more Manzuma. The arrangement was from scratch as Larry (the laptop I've used for midi sequencing and arrangements for years) is on the blink right now. More correctly, he's not blinking anything at all. I laid out the basic structure in Acid before bringing it into Pro Tools and actually having fun. I taught myself to play slide guitar for this one too. And much like the heavy-metal-muted effect Ionesco tried to achieve on Home there were some basic techniques I'd had wrong in my head. Did you know you don't need to have the string and slide (red lighter) pushed all the way to the fret? Amazing! I put slide guitar the whole way through the song, even in the pop-punk chorus. As I said, I was laughing. I thought it was all finished, despite not being entirely happy with it and the humour of the arrangement had well worn off by hour 12. Vanessa came, and we did this:
Uncommon Dream (Verse 1, Chorus 1) 980kb
What you hear is essentially a demo. A demo that seems a little contradictory considering my recent comments on reverb. It still needs a fair bit of work, but the basics are there. There are two slide guitars in there - one Yamaha and one Epiphone, both run through the old Zoom 505. The super-compressed metal guitar has been, in usual fashion, doubled and panned. The most effective part of this song at the moment is the vocal treatment. Vanessa first sang the high melody. She then sang/spoke/whispered the same thing an octave lower twice and we panned them hard left and right. We kept the high vocal in the centre but removed all but the reverb. What you end up with is the slightly disorientating sound of hearing the high melody but getting the definition from the whispers.
This song was recorded in the same way I've been working on Julie Walton's album. That is, ensuring that everything matches the grid in Pro Tools. So long as the tempo of any original loops is correct it's incredibly easy to shuffle things around. And that's the only reason we were able to pull the song apart so quickly last night. We re-wrote the verses and choruses, keeping only little tags. Structure and basics completed, it now does not resemble the little song I wrote back in 2001. We have however kept a little chunk of it, which happens much later in the song. It's a bit weird, but we like it that way.
As mentioned up the page, we need a new name for this song. If you have any suggestions we'd really like to know. Just leave a comment.
I also must say a quick happy birthday to Vanessa's first child, Aleska, who turns 2 today.
The song I'm talking about is Uncommon Dream. At this point the original title remains but will be fixed. It is so wrong for so many different reasons. Allow me to fill in the gaps. In August of 2001 I'd finished up at the Conservativorium (I quit while I was ahead; they were about to escort me from the building) and was filling in my time by writing children's songs with Julie Walton and writing songs like Fall To Earth, Mantra, A Hand In The Rail and Gentle Sport. The latter we've never recorded, but it does make a cool name for a blog. The other three are on Serpent. This little writing spree also gave birth to Uncommon Dream. Back then it was intended to be the next Edge Of A Cloud, all hopeful and fuzzy, but it didn't cut it. We worked it for so many hours but never found its spot. In mid-2002 we had another go at it, adding a new chorus and rehearsing it for live use. It has never been performed. Jump forward to June 2005 and you find Vanessa and I in the same room the song was written, recording a piano/vocal demo of it hoping that slowing it down would give it the 'thing' it's always needed. That didn't work either.
Another six months added to the song's age has obviously worked a treat. Mature now, vintage even, elderly. When I started yesterday I kept the song's original structure, but altered the darker parts to make them a little more Manzuma. The arrangement was from scratch as Larry (the laptop I've used for midi sequencing and arrangements for years) is on the blink right now. More correctly, he's not blinking anything at all. I laid out the basic structure in Acid before bringing it into Pro Tools and actually having fun. I taught myself to play slide guitar for this one too. And much like the heavy-metal-muted effect Ionesco tried to achieve on Home there were some basic techniques I'd had wrong in my head. Did you know you don't need to have the string and slide (red lighter) pushed all the way to the fret? Amazing! I put slide guitar the whole way through the song, even in the pop-punk chorus. As I said, I was laughing. I thought it was all finished, despite not being entirely happy with it and the humour of the arrangement had well worn off by hour 12. Vanessa came, and we did this:
Uncommon Dream (Verse 1, Chorus 1) 980kbWhat you hear is essentially a demo. A demo that seems a little contradictory considering my recent comments on reverb. It still needs a fair bit of work, but the basics are there. There are two slide guitars in there - one Yamaha and one Epiphone, both run through the old Zoom 505. The super-compressed metal guitar has been, in usual fashion, doubled and panned. The most effective part of this song at the moment is the vocal treatment. Vanessa first sang the high melody. She then sang/spoke/whispered the same thing an octave lower twice and we panned them hard left and right. We kept the high vocal in the centre but removed all but the reverb. What you end up with is the slightly disorientating sound of hearing the high melody but getting the definition from the whispers.
This song was recorded in the same way I've been working on Julie Walton's album. That is, ensuring that everything matches the grid in Pro Tools. So long as the tempo of any original loops is correct it's incredibly easy to shuffle things around. And that's the only reason we were able to pull the song apart so quickly last night. We re-wrote the verses and choruses, keeping only little tags. Structure and basics completed, it now does not resemble the little song I wrote back in 2001. We have however kept a little chunk of it, which happens much later in the song. It's a bit weird, but we like it that way.
As mentioned up the page, we need a new name for this song. If you have any suggestions we'd really like to know. Just leave a comment.
I also must say a quick happy birthday to Vanessa's first child, Aleska, who turns 2 today.
