Sonic Experience: Wednesday Wearies
- Nolan
- Apr 8
- 6 min read
Please listen to the song while you read 🙇
WRITING WEDNESDAY
Within the span of 10 days, I have completed another song. It is not typical that I have such high output of music, but I have been challenging myself lately to complete more songs, faster. Maybe in a future post I will explain why.
Following on from Tuesday Tidings, Wednesday is attempting to capture what I think the day of the week feels like.
As Wednesday is the middle of the week, it feels the hardest; deep into the work week, the weekend feeling far away. I wanted to capture the feeling of the "trudge through the workweek" in the song.
I knew I wanted the cut time kick-and-rimshot snare with the arpeggio on an electric guitar.
From there, I played around with a variety of sounds to help fill out the arrangement of the song.
HARDWARE:
The bassy/farty synth that comes in around the 50 second mark is actually my Casio CTK-630
Specifically it's using tone 40: synth-bass 1.
My CTK-630 is a "custom" job I did, shrinking the package down by lopping off the attached keyboard and speakers and replacing the back so that it can fit in the small space of my studio more easily. While it's difficult to find the right song that fits the CTK-630, I absolutely adore the cheesy sounds it is loaded with.
And of course, it just can't be a song I wrote without featuring my beloved JP-8080!
The high-resonant lead synth heard around 1:30 likely is no surprise that it came from my JP-8080. The modulating on the filter was performed by me, rather than using automation lanes or MIDI.
You may notice that at times the opening and closing of the filter seems a bit off beat. After some debate, I decided to keep this off-time "drunken" performance in the song -- it seemed fitting!
What might be more of a surprise is that the deep, smooth bass that plays throughout the song is also a patch I built in the JP-8080.
THE MIX
Surprisingly, I had a tough time getting a comfortable mix on this song. It mostly comes down to how I wanted the jazzy "Doodoo"s to sit in the mix - but more on that in a minute.
(Yes, I will continue to call it "doodoo" from here on out because my humor is that juvenile)
THE GUITAR(s)
It might surprise you that there are 3 tracks of guitars here.
At first, I just had one grungy guitar riding the arpeggio, however, it felt a little too aggressive and rock-ish to adequately fit the mood of Fidel. With some experimenting, I eventually landed on adding in the warbled guitar (Very Dead Pirates coded). It felt appropriate to make it wide, so I double tracked it, leaving the grunge guitar center panned and having the warbled guitar wide and to the side.
About the doodoo...
I struggled to get them to fit into the mix. I wanted them to be present and forward, but also I wanted them to be in the background. What a conundrum!
The doodoo has been double tracked, wide and to the side. Naturally, I had to squeeze in the existing "wide and to the side" warbled guitars a bit centered to make space for the doodoo. I also emphasized the doodoo's gain a lot more, relative to the other instruments.
However, gain and panning was not enough to satisfy the doodoo mix.
The struggle commences...
After iterating through various methods of compression, over compression, OTT compression, EQing, filtering, reverbing, I just could not get the doodoo to sit right with me.
2 things finally helped it feel "right".
Firstly, using an ADSR* filter on the doodoo envelope. Specifically, I used Arturia's DRUMS plugin, which as the name implies, is really more meant for drums and not filtering doodoo, but because it has built in ADSR filtering, and it is very efficient at reading the envelope, it seemed like the best tool for the job.
By using DRUMS I was able to adjust the ADSR to emphasize the D in the doodoo, and reduce the oo in doodoo gradually, making it have more punch and cut through the mix - kind of a DooDoo instead of doodoo
But this caused a problem...
(*ADSR stands for Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release. Attack is the initial hit, decay is how quickly the volume lows after the attack, sustain is the volume in which is is lowered to after the attack, and release is the tail that follows after the sustain.)
At 1:30, legato doodoo is brought in, and with DRUMS the doodoo did not legato. So for each instance of legato doodoo you hear throughout the song, it was necessary to use an automation lane to bypass DRUMS effect on the doodoo.
Would you believe me if I told you I still wasn't happy with the doodoo?
Often, when I write music, I make a preliminary mix. This mix is a mix that I expect will likely need altering, but it's mostly a completed song. Once the preliminary mix is rendered out, I often dump the song onto my phone and go for a walk, where I listen to the song through some consumer-oriented earbuds. This gives my ears a rest from my typical monitoring sources (HS8s and M50x) and allows me to sanity check my own mix. And while I was taking my mix for a walk, I felt miffed the whole time! The doodoo stank!
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I avoid overtly technical and modern mixing techniques as they often leave the mix feeling lifeless or overly produced. Sometimes it's not just okay to have some clashing frequencies, I'd argue it's the soul of the mix (not the music though - different thing).
That being said...Oeksound's Soothe 2 has a nifty feature of monitoring a side-chained source and dynamically reducing frequencies of the output. What this does, in effect, is - unlike traditional gain-reduction side chaining which would lower the whole tracks volume to make space for an instrument, this instead only lowers the gain of the necessary frequencies for the side-chained instrument to cut through.
Very cool! I hate it.
As with any tool, it has it's place. But it's an overkill solution for what is a fundamental mixing problem. I would rather solve the problem at it's core, rather than smash the problem with a hammer.
Regardless, that was the ultimate solution used here; with the doodoo being side-chained to the piano, vibraphones, and warbled guitar to help it punch through more clearly.
CONCLUSION
This post is getting a bit long, so let's wrap up.
One final interesting tidbit I didn't have space for in this post was the musical quotation of The Gathering's "My Electricity". This was done deliberately. The Gathering has been a favorite band of mine since high school.
The song started out feeling mid, and even as I was deep into writing the song, I only had "okay-ish" feelings on the song, but nothing about it had really excited me. My goal was to just finish songs quickly, so I pushed through.
However, a breakthrough did happen about 2/3rds through the writing. When the warbled guitar takes over the melody in the last portion of the song, I really liked how well the guitar came out. I wish I could have performed it on my own guitar, but sadly my guitar skills are still severely lacking -- I will continue to rely on Kontakt libraries for my guitar for the foreseeable future.
It might also be a surprise that the doodoo was a last minute addition to the song, and I really feel like this was the unique hook that made the song go from feeling "mid" (in my eyes) to elevating it to a good song (I think I still like Tuesday Tidings more, though).
I'm glad I could explore using funny sounds like the doodoo and CTK-630. Perhaps I should try utilizing similar types of sounds in future songs.
TOOLS:
You'll need to forgive me, as I am writing this list off the top of my head and may have missed some tools used.
These are not affiliate links, they are simply giving you quick access to learn more about the tools I used.
DAW:
Reaper 6.30
HARDWARE:
Roland JP-8080
Casio CTK-630
Arturia Keylab 88 mk. I
Donner Noise Killer
SOFTWARE
INSTRUMENTS:
NI Kontakt
NI Noire
Soniccouture Vibraphone
Roland Zenology
EFFECTS
Comments