How I Did It
by Pat Chilla The Beat Gorilla
Uses samples from:
Samples are used in:
Tools I Used
Reason 3.0, Reason Drum Kits, Adobe Audition
Samples I Used
ccMixter, of course.
Process
This is my first "How I did it" because my approach to making music is typically very simplistic in nature and this track is no exception. But the end result sounds full and complex and I thought I'd share my audio mangling tactics.
First there was the sample of Victor's How Soon Treatment. Around 1:00 there's a break in the singing and I snagged the acoustic part, but it had C Laynes voice on it so I had to figure out a way to make it sound good. The problem was that when he says "stops" its about 7 or 8 decibels louder than the guitar. All I did was squeeze the hell out of it with an L2 at a -15 for the threshold and a -8 or -9 for the ceiling. That way it tamed the vocal and brought up the volume for the guitar making it sound more even. BTW, is used -9 as the ceiling because the guitar averaged around that much volume at the place where I sampled it. Also, I wanted the artifacts of heavy limiting mildly in that part. I then added a fade in and fade out to smooth the loop a bit. I used around 300 samples on each end. Its not a lot, but it can really tame abrupt loop points without actually hearing the fades. After experimenting with different effects I tried reversind the sample and from there the song begin to take form. As I listened to it loop in reverse it really sounded so 70's rock, that it changed my initial intentions of doing so kind of hip hop number with it.
So from there I fired up Reason and begin searching for drum sounds, kits and loops. I settled on some bad ass loops from Sonic State called Sledgehammer. The meat and potatoes of the drums were 3 rex files from that set. The problem with rex files, though, is that there's no (or limited) variations, particularly in intros, fills, breakdowns, etc. So for that I used Reason Drum Kits and imported a few midi files from that refill (which are incredibly excellent) and begin to chop 'em up and pair them together. I also layered the midi files with some programming of my own to thicken things up. I routed the three rex files and the RDK kit to Spider audio merger in Reason so I could easily apply the same fx to all the drum sounds to try and make them sound cohesive. Looking for a bass guitar, I wanted something that sounded somewhat realistic so I went for the Combinator patch called "Ampeg Flip Top" which sounds pretty good and retro-ish. I took a few test drives and then recorded it into the sequence without quantization to give it a more lively feel. I did nudge some individual notes that were way off, but for the most part it was left untouched. I cut and pasted what I needed.
I needed a change up, so I added another part from How Soon. This time it was at the end of the song around 1:55 where he's saying "breathe again" (I think) and applied the same process as I did with the other sample. It just really sounds good reversed.
That's basically it for the music portion. For the intro and outro I decided to use the first sample playing normally and the rest of the song playing backwards. I also added a little reverb to it to "smear" all the sounds together.
At this point I thought I was finished and was ready to upload it. It didn't sound imcomplete, but I knew it would sound a hell of a lot better if I added a vocal. I've had emonics vocal downloaded for a week or so and knew that this was my best option for the track. Basically his intensity sat well with the track.
As far as syncing the vocals I tried something new. Normally I dump a wav file into Recycle and slice away. However, I was feeling lazy and the Recycle thing is way too tedious sometimes. So I used the time compression/expand in Adobe Audition. I had used it very little up until now and was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it was to sync up the vocals. All I did was dump it into the multi-track and dragged the right bottom edge of the wav file (with the time compress button enabled on the menu bar) and moved it until it "fit". Because the vocal was slower than my track it was easy to see that emonic's 16 bar verse was longer than my 16 bar verse. So I pushed it in until I got a rough match. From there it was a matter of zooming in and fine tuning sync to my liking. I couldn't get it to sync completely through out the verses, so I split and copied the file in about 3 places and applied time compression indivdually on each piece. The cool thing about Audition is that like in Acid you can resize the file to the portion you want to use, copy it and resize it again. That's so cool because you're not using any extra RAM. Once it all fit I was done. I strapped a limiter across Bus A and ran all the tracks through it so I wouldn't clip at all. Plus, like in radio, you get an extra layer of brickwall limiting - further deteoriating the sound, but its a sound we all know and love - for the most part. I definitely wanted that sound on this song.
As you can see, not much to it at all.
Other Notes
This is one of my favorite songs at the moment. Even though its listed under my name with CC, all I really did was assemble the pieces between samples and rex files and then added my own two cents. Thats why I love ccMixter. I would have never went down this road had I been doing my normal daily routine of making beats and what not. I've always had tunes like this in my head for years, but as far as I know there are not too many underground producers going around convincing bands to materialize their songs from inception to hard copy. So thank the stars for virtual workstations and Creative Commons licensing.
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