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.

Digital Single: Cathode Ray

Fourth in my series of free singles is Cathode Ray / U235. These both lean towards the experimental, so they were a lot of fun to put together. There's nothing like unleashing your 'mad scientist' side in the studio!

Bandcamp player:

Cathode Ray opens with a march-like rhythm created from snippets of a sample & hold patch on the Korg Monotribe. The Monotribe also provides a recurring bleepy filter sequence. A bassline, drone, and some percussion sounds recorded from a Toshiba radio form the backbone of the track. The Alesis SamplePad was used to sequence some Speak & Spell percussion and tom-toms. Novation K-Station adds some extra percussive sounds. I manipulated my voice with the Marantz PMD201 tape recorder to create the spoken word part. A very nice VST called Lounge Lizard provides the electric piano.

I should point out that the TV featured in the artwork is exactly as I found it. No TV's were harmed (by me) in the making of this e.p.!

Audio:

Video:

I did something a little different with the video this time. It's shot entirely with a 40mm macro lens and features some of the instruments and devices I used to make the music. My tin robot 'Mini Radiocon,' which you might recognise from the cover of 'Let's Build Mecha!', also makes an appearance.

U235 was the first track I made for the new album project, and my first experiment with the Korg Monotribe. Once I had a patch and a sequence programmed, I recorded several live improvisations, cut them into chunks, and assembled them into a track. I then created various percussion sounds on Roland HS-60, TAL U-NO-LX, and K-Station, and added in a snare from the Yamaha MR-10. HS-60 provides some other synth sounds, more Monotribe was overdubbed, and K-Station and Yamaha CS01 also provide some melodies. Electric guitar can be heard on the ambient sections (backwards). My voice was once again pitch-shifted with the Marantz PMD201.

The title refers to the only fissionable isotope of uranium to occur in nature. In the film A Is For Atom, which I sampled for Isotopes For All, U235 is represented by a frenetic cartoon character. The bouncy arpeggio reminded me of that.

Audio:

Video:

Cover Song: The Tick Tock Man

This year mark's the 30th Anniversary of Gary Numan's classic Warriors album. To celebrate, Numanme has put together the Warriors Tribute project, featuring fan covers of songs from the album. For my contribution I decided to cover a song called The Tick Tock Man. It's not my favourite from the album (that would be This Prison Moon), but it's a well-crafted and oft-overlooked tune I thought could do with some exposure.

For those of you not familiar with it, here's Gary Numan's 1983 original, courtesy of YouTube:


And here's my re-interpretation:


The bassline and a lot of the melodies were made with the Novation K-Station. Chords and pads are Roland HS60. There are some 'big 80s drums' courtesy of the Boss DR-550, some Speak & Spell percussion samples, and the rest of the percussion was synthesized from scratch. The Spring Thing Mks. II & III can be heard on the intro and outro, and the Crumar Performer provides some strings. I should also mention an Alesis SamplePad was used to record the tom-toms. I've not had a chance to write a post about that piece of equipment yet.

My good friend Jimmy Aaron sang the backing vocals, doing a good job of the parts originally sung by Tracey Ackerman. The rest of the vocals and the vocoder fell to me. This song isn't really in my key but I think I did a reasonable job.

Word is that the Warriors Tribute will be a professionally printed 2CD set limited to fifty copies. The contributing artists each get a copy and the remainder will go on ebay to cover the cost of manufacture. If you miss the opportunity to get hold of it, you can download my version of The Tick Tock Man from my SoundCloud page (for free, of course).

The Mechanicals: Technical Commentary

Here's some technical commentary on the tracks from The Mechanicals e.p.:

The Mechanicals (Part 1)
Written to accompany a scene in a devastated spaceship. I started with the percussion: a hand-clap recorded in an old concrete loading bay (see this post) and a piece of 2.5" steel pipe being struck. The former was pitch-shifted an octave lower. Some minimal piano added bass to the track, and from there I added several layers of synthesizer. The bulk of the sounds were created on the Novation K-Station and feature two oscillators ring-modulated against each other. This is best illustrated by the deep bass sound with a wobble to it, and some of the sounds on the bridge section. The K-Station is also responsible for the white-noise percussion elements. A second bass sound, with a delay effect, was provided by the Arturia Minimoog V. The string sound with the rising attack and slow decay was made on the Roland HS-60, which seems well-suited to producing this kind of sound. The rest of the robotic and percussive sounds are sampled from a modified VTech Talking Whiz Kid, and modified PSS-140 keyboard. This kind of minimal electronic piece was something of a departure for me, and I'd like to write more in this vein.

The Mechanicals (Part 2)



I took an aborted bridge section from Part 1, built on it, and this is the result. I also wanted to illustrate the mechanicals concept lyrically. Since I didn't have to worry about clashing with dialogue, I filled up a lot more space in the mix. The Minimoog V makes a return, playing a different melody, and the K-Station provides most of the other synthesizer parts, including bass and lead sounds. The HS-60 adds a much subtler string sound: the best place to hear it is during the first break, accompanying the choir. EastWest Orchestra provides the choir, backing up three layers of my own voice saturated with reverb. My vocals on the verses are both raw and fed through the K-Station's vocoder. Singing backup is the AnalogX SayIt speech synthesizer, both untreated and fed through a granular plugin called Tweakbench Pudding. On the bridge section are several layers of my voice through the Roland SP-404's ring modulator effect. Modified Speak & Spell and Talking Whiz Kid samples can be heard as percussion and melodic elements throughout. As I wrote this 'on spec,' I was very pleased that parts of it were used in Stevie's Doctor Who production.

Insufficient Data
Written to accompany a scene in an abandoned technological structure on an alien planet. My initial concept was to base the track around humming electricity. To that end, I created a sound on the HS-60 not unlike the 60hz hum made by unshielded equipment plugged into 110volt mains voltage. Several attempts were made to find a suitable accompanying melody before the three-note piano motif and square-wave answering melody (courtesy of the K-Station) presented themselves. I intended to keep the track minimal, but during a percussion session in Fruity Loops I threw all sorts of rhythm elements into the mix that changed the whole feel of the track. These were mostly sourced from the modified Speak & Spell. A few Whiz Kid samples provide some eerie atmosphere on the intro, which I liken to the sounds of ages-old computers running forgotten programs for untold millenia. The timpani/kettle drum is from EastWest Orchestra, and the bass drum (with reverse reverb) is an old staple created on the K-Station. This ended up even more 'outside the box' than Mechanicals Part 1, and I'm very happy with it.

The Mechanicals (Part 2) [End Of The World Mix]



My friend Jimmy 'Jamz' Aaron sent me a rough remix of Mechanicals Part 2 he made by setting it to a new drum and rhythm track. This prompted a collaboration to produce it properly. I took out a lot of the original parts to give his heavier percussion more space. On the 21st of December (Apocalypse Day) I was inspired to add some entirely new synthesizer parts. The repeating melody that comes in under the verse was the first. It clashed somewhat with the original lead line, so I dropped the latter completely. In one of those serendipitous moments, a new lead presented itself and gelled immediately. Some resonant stabs from the HS-60 and some extra percussion elements from Jimmy's camp finished the track off. The entire remix was completed in four days, and both of us were thrilled with the result.