Digital Album: Let's Build Mecha (Remastered)

 

Let’s Build Mecha (Remastered)

2020 marked the 10th anniversary of Let’s Build Mecha! so it seemed like a good excuse to revisit it. I’ve always been happy with the sound quality, and I found the mix reasonable considering my lack of studio headphones or near-field monitors when I made it in 2010. At that time I was using a Logitech 5.1 system with a very clean – but thin – sound, and some Sony earbuds. It was also early days for mastering on my part. I believe I’d discovered the wavehammer compressor in Sound Forge by then, but none of the multi-tracks were summed to a master bus, and the title track was mixed-down with hard clipping instead of compression.

In 2012 I made some alterations – Clockwork Robots was made to run seamlessly into Autonomic, for example – but no real ‘remastering’ was done. The biggest hurdle, ten years later, was accessing the original multi-track files. They were recorded in Sonar 2 and 4 and saved as bundle files: single files containing all the data. Newer versions of Sonar don't play well with bundle files and prefer a project file pointing to a folder containing all the stems. A good comparison would be a zip file vs a folder. So I had to open the files on my old Windows XP machine, ensure all the samples and plug-ins were present, and export them.

A couple of songs needed no tinkering whatsoever, beyond clean mix-downs on a superior DAC and some mastering compression. Others required more care. The e.p. has always sounded clean and crisp to me, but I had to wonder why I'd chosen to EQ so many bass frequencies out. I’ll put it down to inexperience.

The songs that required the most attention were the title track - the most layered song on the album - and the other full vocal track: Production Line. The latter has always fallen a little flat, so I wanted to address that. Another challenging piece was Rust and Bones. The bass guitar always had a ground hum that stuck out like a sore thumb. Having some new tricks up my sleeve, I was able to address it. Another issue with that piece was the sampler I was using at the time, a clunky old horse called VSampler, which I could not resurrect. Each instance had to be replaced with Grace, my current sampler of choice, and the attack/release settings carefully tweaked by ear to match the original.

In most cases, the generic Cakewalk EQ plug-in was replaced with the superior Sonitus Equalizer. Heretofore unnoticed digital hiss on certain samples was carefully tamed. Vocals were brightened, and suppressed bass frequencies were restored. One tiny edit was made on the vocals of Production Line, where a slightly off-key word was replaced by an alternate take from the original session. The final step was to check the dynamic range of each track and adjust as necessary.

 

A little history. In 2010 my good friend Stevie K. Farnaby was producing a Doctor Who audio drama for Brokensea.org. He had an upcoming episode called Mechalution, which featured a race of sentient machines. He’d heard the music I’d been making with circuit-bent Speak and Spells, etc... and thought the sounds would be perfect for the show: both as music and sound effects. It just so happened that I had a song called Let’s Build Mecha, inspired by Japanese anime, and it fit the concept perfectly. With the script for Mechalution to hand, I set about writing the rest. 

 I don’t recall any difficulty or writer’s block. The subject matter was so in tune with my aesthetic that I could easily have carried on. In fact the Mechalution storyline was intended to carry on for the rest of the season, but for various reasons Stevie had to halt production. I wrote four more pieces for subsequent episodes (three of which can be found on The Mechanicals e.p.) and two more demos for what would've been the season finale. As of this writing, Stevie is upgrading his studio: so there’s a very real chance there’ll be more Mecha-inspired music forthcoming.

To coincide with the remaster, I've released a promo video for Production Line that was filmed in 2014 but never completed until now.

Slideshow: Rust And Bones

Now that I'm getting a handle on this whole video thing, I'm illustrating some older material and posting it on Youtube. First up is a mix of video and still images accompanying my ambient track 'Rust And Bones' from the 'Let's Build Mecha!' e.p.

It features photographs from two locations shot on my wanderings in 2012. Burnt and rusted car parts, and an entire car body with the twisted remains of a bicycle on top that had been torched like some Pagan effigy. The car in question has since been hauled away, so these photos serve as a document to its downfall.

Perhaps this presentation will give you a glimpse into what inspires my music and art.

The Manitou on Bandcamp

 

I now have an account on Bandcamp for The Manitou's music releases. The Let's Build Mecha! e.p. is already available, a bargain at $5 CDN. It comes bundled with the PDF liner notes, and your choice of high-quality format, including FLAC.

http://themanitou.bandcamp.com/

I hope to get my Thought To Be Extinct album uploaded in the very near future, once I've finished the booklet and gone over the master recordings. There may be some singles forthcoming even sooner than that. Stay tuned!

Doctor Who: 6 Billion Deaths of Soka Virashi

More music from the Let's Build Mecha! e.p. appears in the latest episode of Brokensea's Doctor Who: 6 Billion Deaths of Soka Virashi. You'll also hear excerpts of a new piece of music I wrote called The Return, which features at 7:00 (under a scene) and 33:51 as a scene transition. Featured on the track is my new Roland HS-60.

Let's Build Mecha! iTunes/Amazon Release

The Manitou's 'Let's Build Mecha!' e.p. is now available on iTunes in all countries the service currently caters to, which is pretty much everywhere except for a large chunk of the East. If you're not an iTunes aficionado, you can pick it up from Amazon MP3 in their U.S., UK, French, German, or Japanese stores. Unfortunately that's the limit of Amazon's distribution just now (I can't even buy my own songs from them here in Canada!) But hey-ho, that's the way the baked sugary disc disintegrates.

Providing a link to the iTunes release is more complicated: it's different for every country. The best way to find it is to enter 'Let's Build Mecha' in the search box of your iTunes client, or the iTunes LinkMaker.

While you're waiting, why not listen to the title track?


Let's Build Mecha by themanitou  If neither of these options appeals to you, or you don't think my music's worth paying for, Let's Build Mecha! is available for free from my website at a lower bitrate. Regardless of how/where you obtain it, don't forget to grab the (also free) digital booklet which includes the lyrics and artwork.

The rest of my back catalogue will be released via these two stores as and when I can commit the time to preparing them.

Tales Music: Turned To Stone

Another transition piece for Tales Episode 1, 'Turned To Stone' marks the demise of the Troll Tree Removers after they're petrified by the sun's rays. I wanted it to have a haunting quality. The first idea that came to mind was the sound of tingsha (Tibetan prayer cymbals). These are small cast bronze cymbals on a leather strap which produce a high-pitched ringing when struck together. They're more like bells in that respect. Each cymbal is supposed to sound identical, but possibly mine are slightly out of whack because they produce some harsh harmonics. This just adds to the character though, making them all the more suitable for this track.

I started by recording several takes into my CAD mic and selecting the best ones. If the cymbals wobble about too much you get a wobbly-sounding recording, so after some experimentation I got some clean takes. You can be sure I kept the wobbly ones too, though - you never know when they might come in handy!

I loaded the sample I was happy with direct into Sonar (my multi-track software) and repeated it every couple of bars. I applied reverb to soften the sound a little, but had to tweak it quite a lot. Certain frequencies were bouncing around and sounding horrible. This served as my guide for adding other instruments.

Next I added a plucked spring sound, sampled from my 'Spring Thing' which is nothing more than two dishwasher springs mounted on a board. But hooked up to a contact microphone it sounds fantastic. This already had a reverb all its own, but I added extra software reverb and it totally stole the show.


For the third element I turned to the K-Station synth, with the intention of adding a slow, bright, metallic arpeggio. My tweaking produced a detuned sound - not unlike bells that have been really messed up - more suited for melody, so a melody it was. In an attempt to fit melody to tempo, I threw in a bass-drum sample to play to. That lead to the mimicked sound of a slow hearbeat, which echoes the plight of the poor trolls and further enhances the track.

Oh yes, I almost forgot about the growls. I took a sound from my modified Yamaha PSS-140 FM keyboard and pitch-shifted it way low in shortcircuit. To me it sounds like the growl of an alien animal. No real reason for adding it except that it adds some spookiness.

By then the track was pretty much finished, to my mind. But there's always the temptation to add more, and later on I thought of some string parts and had to try them out. I called upon my trusty Crumar Performer analog string synthesizer for this. I dropped the bottom and mid-range out via the on-board EQ, and modulated the pitch. The latter is a trick I used on the Doctor Who: Mechalution soundtrack / Let's Build Mecha e.p. to give the strings a wailing, melancholy quality, not unlike tape-wobble.

The final element I added was a Chinese woodblock (also called a 'wooden fish'). This was again recorded using the CAD. It sounded too bright in my first version so I pitch-shifted it about an octave lower and EQ'd out some high-end.