hold on, we’re almost there… this one’s about “catching up” – the 2nd song on “corner” (listen to it in the cool blue player to the right at the top of the sidebar).
this was of course inspired by Tom Waits, like a few others on the album as well. there’s this dark soundmess crawling forward, with almost no change throughout the whole song, and a distorted voice just telling this little story. the idea was not complicated at all, but putting it into practice was a somewhat more demanding task. again all sample based (except vocals) but there’s lots of them, about 5 different bassdrums – 3 normal ones and 2 orchestral ones (whatever those are called…), a complete drumkit, a few additional toms, two different kalimbas, xylophones, pan flutes, a bassoon, a synth-sound called ‘plucking teeth’. then a distortion device applied to some of the above mentioned instruments as well as the vocals.
there is a lot of automation going on in this tune, the faders move all the time, even if just little bits. when i started with that song, i figured this should be the easiest one because, hey, how hard can it be to create a soundmess? little did i know :-) making a mess is a lot more difficult than i thought. for one, it’s against everything i ever learned and therefore well outside my field of expertise. no matter what i did, it sounded kind of organised, unbelievable. and it still is not as messy as i wanted it to be – i’m working on it… another reason is, everything about good music-software is designed to make a good sounding recording, from well sounding samples to the different processes you can use to shape the sound. of course, you can always go over the top with the settings but this often sounds just crappy instead of dirty, messy or raw. i plan to record some of the instruments i’ll use in the future myself to combine them with the sampled ones in order to get a somewhat messier sound, but for this album it was out of the question because there was very little time. and you can’t just set up any microphone anywhere, play your instrument and count on the recording to sound the way you want it to. chances are, again, it will just suck and not sound badass-like…
so instead of just throwing something together and guessing it would sound really bad (the good ‘bad’) automatically, it took a lot of experimenting and learning how to achieve such a sound. and that’s quite complex, because our brain is ridiculously skilled in recognising patterns of all kinds and that’s usually a good thing. but patterns are just the opposite of a mess, meaning if you want to create a mess, you’ll have to work hard getting rid of any patterns along the way. ok, you may want to leave a few of them in there to have a rhythm of some kind for instance but anything else could easily become a problem.
as i mentioned, i’m just getting into this mess-making-thing and the song didn’t turn out the way i wanted it in the first place, because it is somehow based on patterns – but on the other hand, i like it. it would seem i need to create more mess-tunes in the future – a lot more….
