MK the Great Sandwhich Prince

This is a very belated submission for assignment 2, the group recording - tumblr has compressed the above image to be unreadable, so I’ve added the full version here. For these recordings I initially set up the zoom mic for take 1 on a pianostool that was in the room, but later changed to a high position mounted on a musicstand, tilted flat, for recordings 3-11 (you’ll note that in the screencap above, I had to pan recording 1 slightly to the left to compensate for the resulting tonal difference). At about recording 8 I placed a folded paper bag under the mic to cushion it on the metal stand slightly. Recording 2 was a dud take so I forget what position it was in - that might’ve been me accidentally pressing ‘record' while moving it, actually. My phone had died (and in fact lost then recovered at Central Station en-route, delaying the session about 30minutes), so Lindalela let me use her phone to take photos - pictured here is one I took of the latter mic-position, shortly after take 8 since you can see the folded bag poking out: (not to mention my shoe at the bottom of the shot!)

Weirdly, with only one of the two halves of the dual-direction mic actually facing the harp, it somehow generated a surprisingly even panning , since the bass notes reverberated nicely against the back wall. This allowed us to record a rich low-end whilst capturing the crispness of the high-notes.  Yanni made notes on any bugs we needed to fix during each take, and filled in the cuesheet, seen below - I’ll let his notes speak for the specifics of each track. His cousin was a wonderful harp player despite her modest protestations, but very understanding when we thought we needed a bar retaken - in fact she often started over herself! Only two sections seemed especially trying in the piece, one notably at the end which we redid nearly a dozen times - even then I couldn’t fully patch out the first one in the edit, although you can see I tried!

Much banter was had, and I think it was a very enjoyable experience for all. 10/10 would harp again. Making the edit itself was relatively simple, with a few tricky parts. Going off personal preference instead of adhering to the actual score, I left in (and in some cases deliberately reinserted) a few tonally-pleasing slips from “inaccurate” takes. To my dismay, the only smooth take of the low section from 1:44-1:51 was on take 1, which had a different mic position - luckily a slight change in pan seemed to sooth it, although you can still hear a sadly-noticeable change in the ambient white noise when it cuts back to take 8.  The part I’m proudest of is the quick succession of cuts at 1:29, combining the best quirks of 3 different takes that all had their own difficulties with that section. Sadly the same was not possible at 2:07, since all 4 takes at that section had a fair amount of trouble so I opted to just go with the one with the best audio on either-side of it. The beginning of the scale at the very end was also infuriating to splice since despite going over it a dozen times not a single take was perfectly on-beat - no insult to the performer though since there’re many rather strenuous jumps in the scale there. Still, even just using three takes there it came out passably, in my opinion.

This piece I decided to go with Option 1, thus it is made entirely using a single sample of white noise, filtered and pitched in a variety of different ways. Tune itself is mostly simple, pretty much just 2 main melodic motifs with a few counterpoints - I remembered your advice on the last track to keep it a little more basic so the listener has something solid to latch on to. The percussion is what I’m proudest of for this though - especially the snare (which is basically just solid noise with a slight 1/16th gate on it, using the grooveshift plugin) and the timpani (achieved using a short bassy burst of static with an enormous amount of reverb on it). This simpler arrangement also allowed me to more easily ‘layercake’ things, although as you can see I still fiddled with EQ a fair bit to get it relatively balanced. 

The melodic parts were made by isolating a single narrow frequency-band of the noise in iZotope RX and then adding different combinations of harmonics, finally sampled in EXS24 - thus I have “noiseMellow” which is just the fundamental,”noiseHollow” which is every-second harmonic (not unlike a triangle wave) and “noiseBrass” which is every harmonic up to the 10th. It’s surprising how much variety can be gained just from combining those three simple ‘instruments’ (and the raw noise itself) in different ways - and due to the random nature of white noise, the actual fundamentals and harmonics are far from uniform tones, thus resulting in a slightly analogue feel to something with such digitally-based harmonics. Admittedly I hadn’t actually initially started this piece with the white-noise in mind - starting originally with a more musicbox + cheesy 90′s soundtrack sort of vibe. Attached here is the progress on that before I switched tactics to better fit the Option 1 brief.

The piece itself is actually mainly comprised of two entirely different motif ideas, that just so happened by complete coincidence that they harmonised well together. I know it’s a little on the short side, only a little over two-and-a-half minutes for a 3min target - originally I had it much slower until I realised it actually worked much better at 110bpm rather than 80 - but I opted to go for the one that made the piece sound better rather than longer, although I did notch it down to 107. Quality over quantity! Originally I was going to try automating some randomised panning for one of the instruments - however I soon realised that it was much easier and more effective to just make two differently-panned tracks and randomize which notes were in each. So much for spending an hour trying to link the LFO with the pan! Having not been able to play this on anything with a sub, I’m unsure if the low-end is clear enough - however looking at a spectrogram of the mixdown, the levels seem about right, so I hope it sounds relatively balanced on better gear.

For the last post I thought I’d attach what the piece sounds like without the eponymous fanfare, just so you can better hear how the different counterpoints interact, and let some of the texture details shine through, such as the brass on the final verse.  The A’-section I knew would mostly be a copy-paste of the A-section if I wasn’t careful, so I had to make a few choices to keep, change or ditch certain things - in the end the only thing that stayed exactly the same was the fanfare, the gated 1/16th, and most of the bass (albeit doubled-down an octave on itself) - I also realised that since the bass was monophonic, I needed to create a duplicate track to do this. I decided on a call-and-response pattern between the fanfare, staccato-strings, and Higher-piano, with each of them echoing the last, in-sequence. The Lower-piano simply mirrored the fanfare, but with full-fifths. The Molokai counterpoint just echoed the bassline but in the treble, as did the rather bombastic brass-line I added to give some nice texture across the whole spectrum.  Having most of the lines now just be simplified versions of each other allowed me to add a wholly new melody on top; the short but smexy Jupiter solo. That was a lot of fun to work out.  The hardest part of this section was the string slide on the drop. Now, most plugin instruments are different using 128-bit pitchbend over +/- 2 octaves, but in GarageBand all the different ‘factory’ instruments are only programmed to use those 128-bits over a whole of +/- 2 semitones, albeit with much precision. This means that to execute any kind of decent-sounding slide, you have to use all 4 semitones, meaning the rest of the melody will be pitched up, so you need to keep the rest of the melody keyed down 2-semitones to keep it at the right pitch. These difficulties are of course entirely limitations of the software itself, but still rather annoying to deal with. 

The outro was simple enough - just the tail-end of the echo from the gated 1/16th. Completely by accident, this perfectly represented how most people’s 4am ramblings are inevitably cut short in their prime without much warning by either sleep or sunrise, instantly fading away like a fast-forgotten dream. I soon realised there probably wasn’t much I should or could add to that.  So with the A’-section basically finished, I gave it a few days to come back to it with a less insommniated mind, and it was time... to tweak. Flourishes like the piano harmony on the first half, little details like the metallic hits added on to pad out the high-end and later strengthen the continuous rhythm over the B-section onwards. Endlessly checking and changing the panning and volume automations, desperately fiddling with EQ’s before realising it sounded better with the default values. Admittedly most of the EQ’s remained at defaults because of this - the only true post-processing done on the track was a <12Hz bass-cut to get rid of a speaker-blowing rumble from an unclean sample. Eventually it was finished, and I realised  that I no longer need to speak in past tense, since you’re here now. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. :-) Max

So with the B section I knew I had to have something with a very different feel to the A-section, but still sounding like it came from the same song. I only actually started on this part once the first A-section was mostly finished (albeit unpolished), so at least that meant I knew what I had to contrast against. I ended up settling on a classic-if-possibly-cliché build-up vamp, abandoning the previous ‘free-form’ beat that didn’t seem pinned to the barlines, and instead had a much more identifiable rhythm to it. Originally this was just straight 1′s on the offbeat but towards the end of tweaking it I changed it to triplets just for the first half (although you’ll note the second and fouth lots of triplets begin on the offbeat, not the 1st). Also shown are my attempts to finally add a continuous on-beat hit with a little hard high-hat - it just comes off as a subtle trap beat if I’m honest with myself. I’m proud of the syncopated hits in the middle there though:

I’ve attached above a very early draft of the track (so early I hadn’t named it!) to better demonstrate just how much was changed/added. At this stage the only real counterpoint is the Molokai, although most of the Piano is already on the B-section, and the only ‘core’ instrument yet to be added is the Jupiter. (To be honest I kinda prefer how simple the intro sounds compared to the final mix - if I had to admit anything it’s that I may have over-cluttered things in trying to texture and ‘professionalise’ it.) The counterpoints here went through a lot of tweaking. The Jupiter line you hear in the final was added last, with the piano and strings coming before it. The piano actually has two different counterpoints, one in the bass and one in the treble. I knew I just had to have a cheesy 70′s staccato string line but it wasn’t until a few versions later that I gave it that lone swung note in the middle. I wanted that one to mirror the Molokai harmony but with more complex rhythm, and keeping layercakes in mind also be an octave or two lower. I’m not entirely convinced of my own choice to have the Molokai overlap with the Jupiter here, but I was determined to keep both, and I tried to pan them away from eachother to at least separate them that way. Maybe I’ll change it, eventually. You might notice the last note of the intro/A-section Molokai counterpoint is held throughout. I wanted to have at least one thing (besides the fanfare at the root) solidly tying the two sections together and that was one of them - the other was the echo on the Jupiter trills. The gated 1/16th finally breaks away on it’s own melody here as well, no longer mirroring the fanfare - notice it changes pan completely halfway through. this was to allow for the Molokai harmony to not crowd the same layer:

Meanwhile the bass does the opposite, no longer accompanying but instead playing the fanfare’s fundamentals on every note. This meant that, as I was using the bass to give the fanfare some welly, I needed to give the low-mid a little bit more texture just before the drop; thus were added the strings on the last repeat - you can hear them a little more clearly in the draft - they’re the same instrument as the high-synth-strings from the A-section but about 3 octaves down. I also had to figure out how to cut that track’s volume to make way for an otherwise-obvious pitchbend, but I’ll get to that properly in a moment. 

Onwards to the A’-section with the final post, coming to a separate link near you: https://greatsandwichprince.tumblr.com/post/184433104704/for-the-last-post-i-thought-id-attach-what-the

This is a piece I’m submitting as part of an assignment for Uni. My only source for playing it back at home in stereo was a pair of headphones with a semi-broken jack, so apologies if the panning’s a little weird - I tried.  So basically my process was this, detailed in roughly-chronological order: I originally had a COMPLETELY different theme in mind, one I’d composed a piano-only draft of many years ago, with a much more industrial and generally far darker tone in mind. However, when I was setting up my tracks in Garageband 6 and looking for good synths to use, I happened upon the bitcrushed-fifths that you hear open up this track, with pretty much the exact same melody I’d nonchalantly tapped out while trying to test the sound of it (with one difference - the last minim in the intro). I immediately realised that that descending-fanfare was rather a lot more fun that what I was planning, and just rolled with it:

R.I.P. my Original Intentions, 2019-2019, you will not be missed. Once I had that riff down, I had to figure out a good harmony to it. Due to the nature of fifth-synths, the hard work of figuring out a chord progression was already completed by accident, so I only needed to find some good counterpoints. I immediately laid down the first few notes of the synth at ~0:20, and improvised from there. This led to the creation of both the Intro and the A-section:

Now, I quickly realised I had absolutely no idea what time signature this was in. The only ‘beat’ I knew I just had to include was a 2-beat kick after every long note in the fanfare. My bars were still on the default 4/4 and there was clearly half a bar left over in each loop. 2/4 made it fit as a round number but was clearly not the actual rhythm. Eventually I figured out that it’s something in the realm of 15/4 (or rather, one bar of 3/4 followed by three bars of 4/4) but since I didn’t realise this until roughly a week after conception, if you’re wondering why the percussion doesn’t seem to follow any set bars in the first A section... well lets just say I was very tired and there’s a reason it’s called “4am Fanfare”. I still like how it sounds though, it disorients you a bit whilst still keeping it flowing:

You’ll notice that this “kick” isn’t a kick at all - it’s actually an extremely low bass-synth. I wanted to have a softer sound than a true kick for this first part (compare it to the one that carries the B-section), so I went with this. It gives a sound more like someone having a wild party but in the next house over. 

I was trying my best to keep layercaking in mind for all of this, and to keep most things generally in different ranges to the other things around it, or if that wasn’t possible then to just pan them differently - the high-strings halfway into the A-section are there solely because I realised I didn’t have anything actually playing specifically in that register. I also remembered to keep the different layers as polyrhythmic from eachother as I could, so you’ll notice that aside form the building-up on the melody in the B-section and the call-and-responce in the A’-section, most of the instruments have their emphasis on very different beats. One of the first tracks that I laid down with this in mind is the warbly one with the gated-1/16th filter that starts to follow the main ‘fanfare’ halfway through the intro. I wasn’t fully happy with the synth it had originally, so I changed it to a live-horn preset but left the filters on:

I’ll admit I’ve never done anything remotely in this sort of genre before, and I’m still not even sure what it is - is it synthwave? No it’s too modern, not 80′s enough. It’s not ambience either, there’s too much that actually grabs your attention. What I did know was that it needed a bass (and despite it following the bars perfectly, I still hadn’t realised what the time signature was). Following feedback from Damien, I doubled this up an octave below with a different bass for the A-section repeat and the A’-section. Note too that the bassline’s repeat in the A-section isn’t identical - theres a single difference. This is because I originally loved the dissonance it caused combined with the unusual harmony from the first counterpoint, but I felt it resolved a lot better with the fundamental a semi-tone lower on that chord:

Probably the most difficult thing I had to deal with was trying to execute the echoes on the extremely-80′s Jupiter trills. I wanted to have them not only cross-panned, but also a specific beat-length apart. This would likely be perfectly simple to automate in anything except GarageBand, which wouldn’t let me set the echo to the right beats using it’s native echo-settings. So, I ended up just creating 2 duplicate tracks with different amplitudes/pannings, and keying in the proper delays manually. I ended up leaving the GB echo on the final of these however, just to give it a final flourish:

Moving on to the B-section in the next post - I fear for crashing unceremoniously into the image/text limit on this one. https://greatsandwichprince.tumblr.com/post/184432459929/so-with-the-b-section-i-knew-i-had-to-have

@snicketsleuth something I thought you’d like - finally got 100% completion on my copy of the rare PC version of the ASoUE game, which means I can finally record all 26 of the unlockable letter definitions, read by Tim Curry. I find “S” rather interesting - hints that Olaf might’ve been rather a friendly chap before the Schism. Mortmain is also a bit cool to note. The other unlockables which took me years to get all of were the “theatre posters”, in which we get to see teasers for all of Al Funcoot’s plays - and more importantly, hear short clips of Lemony’s scathing reviews of them... Will put them in a separate post when I can.