Jaron's Journal
| 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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