Jaron's Journal
| October 19, 2012, 1:03 PM Recording The Song "The End" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hey everyone! Alright, here I come to wrap up these "Dark Forest" posts with the aptly named song, "The End." This was a tough, tough one to record. It's easily the song that I spent the most time mixing on this album. It's also the song that probably went through the most revisions. Here come the details: Listen to the finished song, "The End"
The story behind the creation of "The End" actually began toward "The Start" of the album. On November 30th, 2007, the day after I performed the "Dark Forest" experiment described here, I had a simple idea. I wanted to make a beautiful song using only vocals. Background vocals would hold the chord progression in same way, and perhaps, the beat. A few days later on December 10th, I decided that I wanted the background to be comprised of fast, arpeggiated voices that formed the chords of the song. These would serve to hold the chord progression and the beat to some degree. A day later I decided that this song was going to be about heaven and the end of the journey through the dark forest. I knew if I went this route, it would probably become the last song on the album. And so it did. Excited to see where this song might go, I went into my recording studio in early June 2008 (which makes this the 2nd song I began recording on the album behind Terrible Light). I recorded myself singing short little "Ah's" at different pitches and rearranged them into different patterns. Upon listening to this, I realized that the "Ah's" were playing far too fast to be discernable as a beat or as a distinct set of notes, so I cut the space between each note in half and chose half of the eight 8-note patterns I had used. I then sang a quick lead over this. The result can be heard here. My wife described the background vocals as sounding like distinct drops of water which went well with the imagery painted in the vocals. I agreed :) Now if you've heard the album version of this, you'll notice something interesting. The demo up above is essentially in a 4/4 pattern, but the final song is in 3/4. This was due to a happy accident. In August 2008 I decided to bang out a quick demo on guitar to get some idea for the lead melody. The words I wrote lent themselves to a 3/4 pattern, so I sang the song in 3/4 forgetting about the disparity it would have with the 4/4 version. Ultimately I went with the 3/4 version, because I was a fan of how this melody sounded, and because I didn't know how to move forward with the scant 4/4 melody. In this demo, you can hear the super-fast "Ah's" described above (using shortened notes so that there was a more discernable beat, another one of my experiments) as well as the 3/4 demo after a considerable amount of silence. The new 3/4 pattern required selecting three of the eight eight-note patterns. Also you'll notice that my "verses" in the above demos sound remarkably like the "bridge" in the finished version. This is because I decided to rewrite the verse to have 8 chords instead of 6 with a more definable pattern. I would then use the "verse" chords for the bridge. Nice and simple :) Alright, so here's where it starts to get complicated. I got a little ambitious with this song. I decided that I wanted each and every background vocal note to be its own distinct recording. Futhermore I decided that each note would be tripled with a distinct recording. To do this efficiently, I'd attempt to sing various patterns of notes per chord that I could then layer to form the notes of the chord. In early September 2008, I tried this with Jesse, with the idea that he'd sing half of the notes. Every other arpeggiated note would be Jesse. We tried. We failed. It was difficult to get pitch perfect with such a strange pattern of notes, and you pretty much need to be pitch perfect per note to make this work. So I tried this another way. I tried to hit the same note over and over and over again, with the idea that I would cut up and disperse these notes to the various chords. I gave this a shot and put together a quick chord with triple vocals. The result was ultimately unsatisfying. Rachel and I both agreed that the single note approach sounded much better for this song somehow. At this point my ambition ebbed, and I decided to simply sing single notes for each chord. I would then use each chord over and over again wherever it was needed in the song. I recorded my notes in January 2009 and Jesse's notes in July 2009. Then Jake Russell burst onto the Dark Forest scene in August 2009 starting with this song. I wanted to see if I could add his voice to the background mix. From this point onward there was a constant barrage of sessions and touch-ups with all involved parties, described below in the recording schedule. There were also countless hours of mixing. Most notably for this time period, I added a different sort of background pattern for the chorus. This required a layered set of "ha's" from each person involved. I also added Rachel to the mix in February 2011. But since we didn't have time to build on this session, I only used her notes at the very end of the song, which was a nice touch :) Finally I sang lead in sessions that ranged from November 2011 to May 2012. I also added a slightly arpeggiated full chord to end the song in December 2011, spacing the notes such that it sounded like a "voice" guitar was getting slowly and meaningfully strummed. The final result of the song as a whole was not quite as good as I expected, but it was still a very fitting finish to the album! And honestly I was glad to be done with it. Of all the songs, this is probably the one that stalled me the most due to the excessive amount of effort it required to mix it. And that does it! My Dark Forest blog posts are at an end. Thanks for tuning in everyone! As always I'll leave you with a missing link demo. All comments and questions are welcome. The recording schedule is below.
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