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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| 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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