electronica
electronic
Story behind the song
“Venus in an Old Mercury”
The first new singing track I’d done in years was well-received, so what the hey, I did another but this time I decided to give the lead vocals to the wife, just to see how it would turn out.
This song began when I had a little vocal melody recorded into Sonar 7 with a little drum loop I’d put together with the “Distinct” kit in Battery 3. Well, another little melody came to me while I was listening to just the drums, so I slowed the tempo down to 93 bpm and shelved the original melody for the time being.
This was the first song I’d begun in Sonar 7, so it was time to give the new step sequencer a good workout. It’s pretty nifty, and is especially useful with the built in “swing” controls. I pushed the swing up to 59 on some of the drum tracks to give them a bit of a hip-hop feel as that was the tempo range I was working in. I modulated the hold/decay of the snare sound with a slight random factor so that the varying hit lengths add a little variety to some drum patterns that only change a little bit throughout the song. The drums were left completely dry, and I only effected the one eight bar kick section in the last verse by adding some wave-distortion, phasing and EQ.
The keyboard sound that is present for the verses and bridges is an FM8 Rhodes patch that I altered somewhat, especially the tremolo, obviously. The keyboard sound in the choruses is a MarkVIII patch with some alterations from FM8 as well. The solo synth is a patch I programmed in NI’s Massive – a quick 5-minute throw together sound. So there’s not a lot of instrumentation going on, as it’s a vocal dominated track.
Speaking of vocals, V-Vocal has already become studio crack to me, lol. One of the main reasons I upgraded my Sonar and not my Live recently is because I wanted to get back to doing some vocal tracks. Because I have a special ability to naturally sing in tunings that lie somewhere between true pitches, I wanted to see what V-Vocal could do for me. I love it, quite frankly. I still record numerous takes of our singing parts while looping each take to it’s own layer and then trawl through those to comp the best sections, but after that it’s into the V-Vocal for some quick tuning. It really is easy to just drag individual notes or words into better tune and still have it sound natural. There’s V-Vocal on every clip of this song, and only one little word that I couldn’t completely process to my liking.
For Ellen’s verse vocals, I ran her voice through a Kore2 patch I’d set up of Voxengo Gliss EQ, a cabinet simulator for some light roughing up of the voice, and some very light beat-delay. My vocals, of course, were processed in a majorly indulgent way that I hope doesn’t destroy the track, lol. I ran it through EQ, some grain shifting (on some of the parts), EchoMania (an included Reaktor ensemble), the Voxengo Marquis Compressor, and more Voxengo Gliss EQ when mixing down. On Ellen’s bridges, I sent the last word of every two bar section through the effects chain I had set up for my vocal, which gives it a cool falling away delay sound.
I used the Lexicon Pantheon reverb that comes with Sonar 7 and gradually increased the send on Ellen’s vocal in the chorus section. I used a smidgen of this reverb on some of the keyboards, I think. I did add some mastering reverb in Ozone 3 to make things gel a little bit, which only required a very light 5% level on a plate setting.
I tried not to compress too much while mastering, settling for about 2 db of average compression on the 3 lower frequency bands, leaving the upper band untouched. I moved up the downward expansion on the bottom frequency band in Ozone 3 to get rid of a few low sucking sounds that were coming in after the kick, which I hope cleaned it up a bit.
For mastering EQ in Ozone 3, I cut some low mids where things seemed to be piling up, gave a little, rounded boost at 7 Khz because I was searching for a frequency rang