Jaron's Journal
| October 1, 2012, 10:37 AM Recording The Song "Dark Forest: Part II" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hey everyone! I'm immensely pleased with how "Dark Forest: Part II" turned out! It's so wonderfully creepy and hopeful at the same time. Here's how it happened: Listen to the finished "Dark Forest: Part II" song
As the name implies, "Dark Forest: Part II" is a continuation of the song "Dark Forest." They began at the same time as one song. The chords and word pairings were picked at the same time as detailed in Recording The Song "Dark Forest," and the lyrics were fleshed out at the same time in 2010-2011. It has the same chord progression and melody. Yet it's a different instrumental take with a different tone. It finishes the story. At the beginning of the album, "Dark Forest" talked about one man's journey through a dark forest that seemed hopeful, but quickly soured. In this take, the same individual catches the hope he'd been looking for after facing the darkness a second time, and promptly finishes his journey, heading to the heaven described in "The End." As mentioned above, "Dark Forest" started as one cohesive song/experiment that I decided to split thematically into two songs pretty early on in 2008 (I think). I wanted them to act as "book ends" to the album, with "The End" becoming the "encore," much like what was done on The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" and "A Day In The Life." After I decided on this split I knew I was going to get to this song eventually and give it a different instrumental feel. After some time my mind settled on making it a stripped down song on acoustic guitar. So who better to turn to than Jake Russell! On 6/30/2011, just a few short months after I'd begun recording the song "Dark Forest" in earnest, when it was simply a vague collection of vocals and a rough demo, I gave Jake the chord progression and asked him to come up with a simple acoustic guitar riff. I only had one verse and one chorus for this song, so I knew it was going to be short. Worried that it might be too short, I suggested playing the chorus, playing the bridge and finishing with another chorus. Jake suggested finishing with an instrumental bridge. I agreed! So now, whereas "Dark Forest" had an "Intro/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Chorus" structure, "Dark Forest: Part II" had an "Intro/Verse/Chorus/Bridge" structure. Jake laid down a beautiful acoustic riff to this. During this I had another idea. I'd always imagined an atonal ascending harmony to the melody during the verses. I suggested that Jake should play this harmony with the acoustic guitar, bending each note to give it an eery expression. Jake took it one step further and added a weird, weird harmony on top of this that didn't even fit the weird chord progression that already existed in the verses. I loved it! I only suggested changing one note, as it made it sound a little too cheery in a certain spot :D Shortly after this, I pretty much filled out the song in one session. I sang the lead vocals and added background noises, including the wind, the house creaking, the witch's laugh, the whispering (who's that man over there? I don't think I like him...), the eery laugh and the owl hoots. I was quite pleased with the final result! I decided to leave it there for the sake of simplicity. All that remained were a few touch-up, odds-and-ends sessions. I re-recorded Jake's acoustic guitar riff, because the first recording was a bit damaged. I took a genuine laugh from Jesse Dunivent taken from when we were recording "The End" and used it as one of the background noises. Finally I extended the wind noises so that they could more readily bleed into the songs immediately preceding and following this song. That's it! The wonderfully simple and creepy "Dark Forest: Part II" had the shortest recording schedule of any song on the album (detailed below). And ironically I was done with this song before I was ever done with the song "Dark Forest." There's only one missing link demo, but it's a fully mixed, David Hechler version that doesn't sound too different from the final product. Next time we will finish up this series by discussing "The End," a completely vocal song!
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