Jaron's Journal
| September 24, 2012, 9:00 AM Recording The Song "The Fullest Picture" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hey everyone! "The Fullest Picture" is tied with "Dark Forest" and "The Owl" for my favorite song on the album. Gun to my head, I'd probably pick "Dark Forest" at this point, but I love this song. And this is amazing, because I used to think this was going to be the most boring song on the album. Or that it was going to be an utter failure. Honestly I didn't know what to think! I'll tell you why in a moment. Listen to the finished "The Fullest Picture" song
This song began on or before 8/19/2008 as an experiment. In the recording of the experimental album "Low," I'd heard that David Bowie and his backing band recorded vocals and instrumentals for the same song without hearing what the other was doing. This sounded like an intriguing idea, so I decided to give it a shot. The experiment was simply this: I'd create a chord progression and bang it out as simply as I could on the piano. Then I'd record simple instructions on the progressive mood of the song. I'd distribute this to different people, and they would record whatever they felt with their specific instrument, without hearing what anyone else was doing. So I set about creating and recording this on 8/19/2008 and initially sent it to David for drums and Jesse for electric guitar. Nothing happened until February 2010 (again, passing 2009). I went into the studio and decided to fulfill my end of the experiment. I attempted to come up with a melody. Three months later I had another pass at it. I came up with a rough melody that I was moderately pleased with. Then in August my friend David Hechler came down for a visit. He came up with a drum piece that followed the chords without hearing my melody. This was a great step forward for the song, but it also essentially locked me in from making any fundamental changes to my melody, due to the rules of the experiment. At this point the song sounded like this, and honestly I didn't hold out too much hope for it. Of all the songs I had so far, this one seemed to be one of the dullest. Still I'd press on with it to see what the other members of the experiment would do with it. Boy was I in for a surprise! In November 2011, I invited Jake Russell to participate in the experiment and use his acoustic guitar. I told him that he could do whatever he wanted and add as many layers as he wished. At first he played a relatively straightforward acoustic piece that followed the chords. Then he decided to layer another set of chords on top of this that complemented and added to the original chord structure. Not knowing what to expect, I listened to what he recorded. This shot the song through the sky for me! I fell in love with it for the first time. The harmonies Jake made gave the song such a beautiful, ethereal edge. These harmonies were later buried in the mix because of all of the other pieces that came after, but I'm going to mix a demo showcasing these so you can hear what I'm talking about. Here you go! Later that month, I had Jesse over for two days for a Dark Forest recording session. For starters I gave him the opportunity to add to this experiment. We spent the entire session on it. This was due to a few factors. Jesse is usually the type who likes to listen to a song in its current state and add complementary pieces to it, especially in regard to rhythm. So he was a bit like a fish out of water the entire time. Nonetheless he put on his best face and plowed through it, putting his all into it. He made the song his own, by adding bass guitar and layer upon layer of electric guitar, doing his best to fit the mood. Some of these electric guitar pieces were soft, subtle and introspective. Others were loud and distorted. In some parts of the song there were no less than four layers of electric guitar! And then he came to the solo. We worked on this for hours, but at the end of the day he knocked it out of the park. It was astoundingly awesome! After he was satisfied, he stopped and listened to the song with all of the other pieces. Ironically it wasn't quite what he expected, because the other pieces didn't fit the direction he was imagining. But I assured him that this was the beauty of the experiment, that I loved it, and that he might come to like it more with time. This proved true :) In January through March of 2012, I filled out the melody using new lyrics and doing my best to fit it into the structure of the old melody. I took a few liberties at the end by adding a harmony that didn't exist and by singing some lines that simply weren't there in the old version of the song, but I think at the end of the day I remained faithful to the original melody. Then came the whip cream on top of the cake. I invited Lisa to participate in the experiment. She added the "Ahh's" you hear in the background in about one or two takes, again without hearing what everyone else was doing. And in the end? I had a beautiful song and an immensely successful experiment. I may do this again! With different parameters, perhaps. Here's a missing link demo for you. Recording details are below. In my next post, I will discuss the immensely simple and creepy "Dark Forest: Part II."
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| September 14, 2012, 12:21 PM Recording The Song "The Owl" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hey everyone! The Owl! This is one of my favorite songs and seems overwhelmingly to be the favorite of most of the people who have listened to "Dark Forest." It is the last song I started working on for the album and is based, in part, on the movie "Labyrinth." Listen to the finished "The Owl" song
This song was first written in a fit of inspiration on 3-14-2011. Oddly enough, it's the only song on the album where the lyrics actually preceded the music. This is how I hope to write most of my music in the future, especially considering how well this song worked. So about the lyrics. This is a song about a relationship with an ex that soured, and my reflections and feelings on that relationship in the present day. I used figurative imagery from the 1986 movie "Labyrinth" to lay out the story. Essentially I'm singing from the perspective of Jareth, the "bad guy" from "Labyrinth" at the end of the movie after his will was broken by Sarah, and he turned into a powerless owl. Cheesy I know, but I had a lot of fun with it nonetheless :) The lines "today I thought about my precious one who threw me out" and "as my world fell down that day" are direct references to two of the songs in the movie. Upon reading the first draft of my lyrics, my friend Jake told me that the image of the owl seemed arbitrary given the subject matter, and indeed, those who didn't get the "Labyrinth" reference, which is easily Everyone Who Listened To The Song, would think the same thing. So I connected the dots with the easily identifiable archetype of the "wise owl," since I always prided myself in my intellect and didn't feel that I was particularly liked for this in the aforementioned relationship. It worked beautifully! Thanks, Jake! Now here comes more Labyrinth-y-ness. For those who don't like this movie, I offer my apologies >:) When I went about writing the music, I wanted it to sound almost like it could be a song from "Labyrinth," so I took the melody of the first line from "Within You," flipped it backwards, and messed with the timing a bit. This became the melody for the first line of the verse; "Today I thought about my precious one who threw me out" came from "How you turned my world, you precious thing." I wrote chords around this and filled out the rest of the verse with whatever made sense. Next I took the chords from the pre-chorus and chorus of "As The World Falls Down" and flipped them backwards. I used these as the chords for the chorus. I also flipped the corresponding fretless bass and "ah-ah-ah" pieces from the chorus, flipped them backwards, and used these for the bass and electric guitar parts of the chorus. Listen to "The Owl" backwards sometime, and you'll see what I mean :) And as for the bridge, that was a Jaron original chord progression, and one I'm quite proud of. I wrote it while Rachel was away in Boston in January 2012. And I almost didn't write it because I was a bit tired. Thankfully, I fought against it! I began actually recording this song on 1/29/2012, and had an all-star cast help me out. Jake laid down guitar and the bass vocal harmony. Rachel and Lisa filled out the alto and soprano harmonies respectively. Jesse played the bass and electric guitar pieces and Danielle Gines played the piano. I filled out the vocals, the drums, and the tenor harmony; closing out recording on 6/4/2012. This was a fast song to record, especially considering all of the work I was doing on the other songs during this time period. One final note on the four/five-part harmony. I wrote the ending chorus harmonies using the chords Jake played on guitar for the chorus over the "actual chords" of the chorus, oscillating between 4 to 5 note chords. This is another one of those things that worked beautifully. Thanks again, Jake Russell! That's it! I only have one missing link demo for you, because only one was created. Recording details are below. Tune in next time for another favorite from the album, "The Fullest Picture!"
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| September 7, 2012, 7:53 PM Recording The Song "Terrible Light" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hey everyone! "Terrible Light" is the first song I began recording on 3/2/2008 and one of the last songs I worked on on 6/4/2012 (the day of the last Dark Forest recording session), meaning I worked on this song for 4 1/4 years! This was due to an endless amount of tweaking. This was also the only Dark Forest song I ever worked on while living in Oregon, IL. Sordid details following: Listen to the finished "Terrible Light" song
This song came into being on November 29, 2007, the same day I performed the experiment for the title track of the album. After randomly picking enough word pairs for "Dark Forest," (described here), I was left with four random word pairs. I decided to use the coolest sounding word pair as a title to a song. I picked "Terrible Light." Then shortly thereafter on December 6, I played around on the guitar in an attempt to find out how to form an augmented chord. I accidently found out how to play a M7 chord, which I immediately fell in love with. I decided that I wanted to write a song, a simple song, that was composed entirely of M7 chords. I quickly composed a beautiful, haunting chord progression. Then I thought to myself, "This sounds like it should use that title I picked, 'Terrible Light.'" And so a song was born! The name 'Terrible Light' sounded like a metaphor for God. Looking at it one way, God's a brilliant light that is "terrible" in a good sense, but also "terrible" in the sense that He's not always easy to follow or approach. I wrote lyrics (in March '08, I think) that felt out this idea and connected with my own hesitations and fears of following God. For Christmas Rachel Davis and company had pooled together to give me the beginnings of a recording studio, and I had initially experimented with these by recording a cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Then March 2008 rolled around and I was chomping at the bit to begin recording the "Dark Forest" album. I started the whole process with a quick demo of "Terrible Light." Some time after this, while exercising in a gym in Oregon, IL, I had "Terrible Light" in my head. I suddenly heard this beautiful 4-part harmony for the end of each chorus. I took a mental note of this, knowing it would become a part of the song. Then in my first recording session with Jesse, Day 2, Jesse laid down the chords and a complementary lead piece on acoustic guitar. I loved it! It was so beautiful and peaceful. After coming home from this session, I quickly went to work filling in the lead vocals and the harmonies I'd taken note of. For the lead vocals I sang to a sped-up and slowed-down version of the song, then pitch-shifted these vocals to match the actual pitch of the song, making it sound like a deeper voiced Jaron was singing with a lighter voiced Jaron. David and I got together at the end of September (he was living a stone's throw away at the time) and did a quick mix of what I had so far for "Terrible Light." I blogged about it, made recording details about it (which sound an awful lot like what I've just written) and released the first demo of the "Dark Forest" album. The lost year of 2009 came and went. August 2010 and David Hechler rolled around, and I decided that after two years I should probably get back to this. So I asked David if he could write a drum piece for this song. He made one up on the spot and had it down in two takes. Without a click track. Like. A. Boss. A month later I tripled the vocal on each harmony to give it a smoother effect. I also did touchup work on the lead vocals and added a lead vocal echo. David mixed a version of this that can be heard here. I figured I had this song in the bag, and that I wouldn't have to go back and tweak this song. Then the lyrics changed. So I went back into the studio and rerecorded the changed lines in July 2011. Again I took this to David Hechler and again, he mixed it and gave me another version of the song. I thought, "surely this is it." Then I wrote a bass piece. Jesse laid this down in March 2012. And the vocals from July always...bothered me. I realized I had used a "deep" effect on my voice before pitch shifting it up, and this changed the tone from the original vocals. This was because I sang these normally before pitch shifting them. The result was a jarring mix of tones. So once again, I tweaked the lead vocals and the lead vocal echo. Finally I had a finished piece that David mixed days before releasing the album. Whew! So oddly enough, I think that the finished song has vocals from the 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012 vocal sessions. So there's an army of Jaron's from different years singing this song. Weird, huh? Here's a missing link demo. The recording schedule is below. Stay tuned next week when I talk about "The Owl," the most popular song from the album so far!
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