Jaron's Journal
| August 28, 2012, 10:14 AM Recording The Song "Plain Of Dreams" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Well then, my fellow countrymen and countrywomen, "Plain Of Dreams" is one of my favorite tunes from "Dark Forest!" And it was one of the simplest songs to record. Here's how it happened: Listen to the finished "Plain Of Dreams" song
I'm not sure exactly when the idea for this song first came into being, but I know it was sometime before November 2008. The initial idea was to sing a melody over ambient "dark forest" noises. After a little more thought, I decided it would be fun to make a drum beat out of the sounds of striking trees in the woods. I nicknamed this idea "Ambient Forest." The guts of this song were created and recorded during the "lost year" of 2009 during a fit of inspiration. I decided that I wanted to structure a song to build the forest noises around, so I began banging out chords on my keyboard and humming a melody. I then quickly recorded this, almost forgetting most of the song on my first attempt. Luckily I remembered it all on my second attempt and this quick demo resulted. As you can see, the song was pretty much all there. I simply took what I had and repeated it twice for the complete song. Nice and simple! The next logical step was to get the "night noises" I'd always imagined to be in the song. I wanted to capture these in the woods at night, so I figured doing it in the gullies in Greenville would be easiest. I threatened to go about this for a long time, but the right equipment, the right season, the right amount of time, the right amount of motivation and the right weather didn't coincide until two years later in August 2011. On the evening of the 31st I ran outside with my laptop and equipment in tow, chasing an owl I'd just heard in the gullies outside of my in-law's house (this is another story altogether.) As soon as I set up my equipment at the end of a long set of extension cords, the owl, representing one half of my initiative, disappeared. The other half was to gather my coveted noises. So I captured several things: the normal ambient night noises, rustling leaves, a combination of banging different sized sticks against different sized trees and a few bangs on an old, rusted metal bin that just happened to be nearby. I then spent the next few days turning theses noises into a drum beat. I used a small stick hitting a small tree for the "high hat," a medium stick smacking a mid-sized tree for the "snare", a giant stick hitting a large tree for the booming "kick drum," various sounds in between for the three-note "tom" hits and a heavily reverbed hit on the metal bin for the "crash." I used the shuffling sounds panned left and right during the verses to simulate someone walking. Lastly I used the night noises as the background of the whole song. At this point, the song sounded like this. On another note, it was around this time that the song became "Plain Of Dreams," inheriting the title from what eventually became "Happening Now." This was because the lyric with "Plain Of Dreams" was cut out of "Happening Now," but the phrase "Plain Of Dreams" worked its way into this song. It fit well with the theme. After this, Jesse Dunivent added his own flair to the song by playing heavy guitar over the chorus, choosing the chorus because of the faster tempo. Jake Russell filled the entire song with several acoustic guitar pieces, intentionally layering some of them. I added lead vocals with relative ease due to the good amount of practice laying down vocals I'd had and the fact that this song fit snugly in my range. Jesse then circled back around and added bass guitar to complement his electric guitar. And once again, that's it! This was a relatively simple and straightforward song to lay down. But it's one of my favorites because of the melody and the message, which comes straight from the many musings I've had on what I'm doing with my life and how I spend my time. Here's a missing link demo. The recording schedule is below. Next time we we'll discuss "Terrible Light," the first song I tried to record for this album!
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