I’m a little bit proud of this track as it came together quite easily.
Long pauses.
My first thought was to use Ancient Greek musical fragments as those were chock full of long pauses, mostly due to their fragmentary nature. (There are some folks who have tried to reconstruct those sounds with some success.)
But, when I sat down to record, I started playing around with the piano. I did two takes and what you hear is take #2 in its entirety. I don’t have a full-sized keyboard so I had to use what was available, which was an iPad.
I plinked around a little bit with no real direction other than for it to have some space or room to maneuver.
The vocals gave me some trouble, though, or, the lyrics did at least. I did about seven takes total and wasn’t really sure where to take this one. I started out with the obvious, spacey, “What is life and living” type of philosophical whatever (much of which I had covered in previous recordings). Further, a lot of it seemed to be coming out a lot more negative than I thought was necessary. Just because there are long pauses, doesn’t mean it has to be pensive or cynical. So the challenge was to go against the initial idea.
I recorded two of the “philosophical” takes, another couple of readings in Latin and Ancient Greek (some Church hymns and other dithyrambs or choruses to Dionysos) before simply narrating what was happening outside of my window. And by outside of my window I really mean, what I was seeing.
Granted, what I see now is probably a very superficial glance at what’s happening compared to what someone would see if they were to look for the first time. But that was sort of the point: to see it with my eyes that have been looking out at this scene for so long that it’s hard to even compare it to where I’ve been.
At least, that’s the philosophical reading of the words I spoke.
None of the lyrics were rehearsed nor did I write anything down, I simply listened to the piano track I had created and spoke what came to mind. I did two takes like this and then spliced them both together, moving some bits here and some there. For the most part, however, the two tracks run in parallel to each other in the order that they were recorded.
Since I recorded the piano in Garageband on an iPad, I played it back through headphones and then had the microphone set up separately. After I was done (though still doubting its completion and my satisfaction with the final track), I exported the project to Logic Pro and mixed together the three tracks. Here’s a screenshot of the project:
Given the spacing between words and sounds, I used the “Remove Silence” feature to get rid of a lot of the extra noise that was being picked up around my apartment. I’m not sure if this feature only removes the quiet parts or if it also dissolves the audio in and out. Either way, the piano track covered up any drop in sound wave consistency.
For the vocals, I ran each track through the same buses as the piano, giving them a bit of Reverb and Echo just so they weren’t so “dry”.
The one part that gave me some trouble was the ending. At first I had the track ending on a higher note, which was actually just the very end of the iPad keyboard. Once in Logic, however, I felt the track needed to be resolved a little bit better so I added a final triad to the end. I tried doing this in Logic but couldn’t get the tone right so, instead, simply recorded a five second take on the iPad and then exported that project to Logic as well. Not the best solution but it worked.
So that’s it. This was probably the fastest that I was able to complete a track so far. I still kind of want to revisit the Latin and Greek lyrics but it will have to wait for another time. I don’t want to force anything so I will wait until it is a better time to deploy.