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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| August 24, 2012, 11:11 AM Recording The Song "Happening Now" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Alright ladies and gents, It's time to discuss the recording details of "Circus"....er, I mean "Plain of Dreams." Wait! "Happening Now!" Listen to the finished "Happening Now" song
The story of "Happening Now" began happening on 8-28-2008. The simple drum beat of the song was something that I'd been apt to tap out in the years preceding this date. But upon this date, I decided that I wanted to form a song around it, and moreover, I wanted it to be a circus-y sounding song. So I creatively codenamed this song "Circus." The following day, I came up with a circus-y chord progression and laid it down on my electric guitar. I then sang/hummed out some nonsense lyrics. The result was this. A week later, during the first official Dark Forest recording session with Jesse described here, Jesse and I laid down electric guitar, bass, keyboard drums and vocals for this song. This was officially the first Dark Forest song Jesse and I worked on together. Ironically none of the takes from this session actually survived into the final mix. Not a one! But it did give us the strong, essential structure for all of the aforementioned pieces which were subsequently re-recorded in the following years. The result was this. Take special note of the chorus that I didn't yet know how to sing. Jesse said this version made it sound too broadway-ish. I agreed. When the lost year of 2009 rolled around, a little bit of effort did go into this song. Firstly I came up with a bridge on 6-9-2009 that was not used. Lastly Jesse and I had another recording session on the weekend of July 10-12. At that point I had a firm structure for how the song was going to go, so Jesse simply recorded his electric guitar pieces around that structure and came up with the bridge. I also attempted a harmony on the verse, but this went nowhere. This song then slept for eighteen months. It awoke on New Years Day in 2011, right along with a firm resolution to finish the album. On that day, and for many of the following days, I worked on laying down drums (on my brand new drum set), vocals and organ. And having worked on rewriting the lyrics, the song had a new chorus and a new title, confusingly "Plain Of Dreams." But there was a problem. I couldn't quite figure out how best to sing this song. But I made several attempts until I was decently satisfied with the result. David and I cobbled together a bass piece that weekend (January 7-9) and mixed this with what I had thus far. This was the final result. Not bad, but there were a few problems. Firstly, the chorus was entirely too wordy, so I chose to rewrite it. And the rewritten chorus didn't contain the phrase "Plain Of Dreams," so now the song title was nonsensical. After much thought, I decided to retitle the song "Happening Now." And secondly, I just wasn't happy with the vocals on the song. They were a little pitchy and they didn't have that punch that I was expecting. At this time, I was listening to alot of Jake Russell Band tunes, and after hearing one of them, I thought to myself, "I really want 'Happening Now' to sound like that." So I decided, "Why not?" I asked Jake if he could sing the song as an experiment and he consented. We layed his vocals down in July, 2011; and I was pleased with result! That same month, I got with Jesse again so we could lay down a full version of his original bass piece instead of the more choppy version David and I had cobbled together. And in May, 2011, I decided to sing some lines by myself and/or with Jake to add some more punch and variety to the song. That's it! I'll leave you with an instrumental missing link demo, and I'll get around to posting about the actual "Plain Of Dreams" song that appears on the album sometime in the next two weeks.
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| August 8, 2012, 8:33 AM Recording The Song "Plastic Sea" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Alright ladies and gents, Plastic Sea! One of the original kingpins of the Dark Forest album! Sentence fragments! Details below! Listen to the finished "Plastic Sea" song
Alright, so before I begin, I've noted something interesting. This song and "Terrible Light" are the only two songs that don't feature one of my main collaborators on the "Dark Forest" album, Jake Russell. Also, my other strongest collaborator, Jesse Dunivent, only missed one song, "Animals." I consider these guys two of my best friends, and they were invaluable in helping to create this album--I'm not sure I could have done it without them. This being noted, "Plastic Sea" brings me back to the days when the "Dark Forest" was a little seedling; back when it was mostly a collaboration between Jesse and I over a series of weekends in 2008 and 2009. So in early 2008, a quick little musical idea popped into my head, something that sounded almost Pink Floyd-ish or Beatles-ish (or more specifically Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds-ish). I quickly grabbed my new digital recorder and recorded this. This sat around until 8-28-2008. I took what little I had and recorded this quick demo. I then spend the next week or so creating the pre-chorus and chorus. On September 5-7, 2008, Jesse and I got together and had the first official Dark Forest recording session. I prepared many songs for this occasion, and it was a very productive weekend indeed! We recorded pieces for "Happening Now," "Terrible Light," "The End" and "Plastic Sea." You can read all about it here. Jesse and I laid down the instrumentals that stuck with the song all the way to the final version. Toward the end of 2008, I released my first demo from the album, "Terrible Light." I was quite proud of how this turned out, so I set out to release another demo in 2009. Plastic Sea was an obvious choice. So about this "Lost Year," 2009. I wasn't lazy and unmotivated all of the time; just most of the time. And at the beginning of the year, I had quite a bit of energy to muster. But after attempting to sing "Plastic Sea," I was hit with a double crisis:
In any case, after some effort, I made this demo so that I could get some feedback from Jesse. It's a bit rough :P This is also back when I ended the song with a "Falling Down" section that I imagined bleeding into the song "Jump," a song cut from the final album. Vocal session after vocal session ensued, and the song evolved. I decided that the song would sound best if I pitch-shifted my voice for the verses, pre-choruses and ending. Even with this, I worked and worked on getting it to sound right. I also decided to shake up the ending, because Jesse wasn't such a fan of it. Upon reflection, I can see where he was coming from. It didn't fit the song. On June 6, 2009, I had a demo. And I made it available here. Whew! This song was then sentenced to the vaults for two years. I didn't feel like working on it again :P When I dug it out in June, 2011, I had Beach Boys'd the piano piece (drawing inspiration from "Surf's Up"), and I gave this to Kelcie Mattson to play. I then created and recorded my favorite drum piece on the album. Yes! I went back for the umpteen-zillionth time and re-re-recorded the vocals. I knew it had to be done due to the changed lyrics and possibility of mixed tones, but I avoided it like the plague for as long as I could. My friend, Beth Perry, then sealed the deal by adding live violin. Beautiful! And that's that! The final product, in my opinion, is outshined by a lot of its neighbors, but it's still one of my favorites on the album. Here's a missing link demo. The full recording schedule is below. Stay tuned next time, when we'll talk about the many faces of "Happening Now!"
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