More thoughts on MIDI

Because there's so many instrumental layers to "Escapade" (the song), I'm taking a slightly different approach to producing it compared to the previous 6 tracks.  Rather than starting with just my keyboard parts and a few placeholder "guitars" and "basses", I've opted to start by programming all the parts, drums and all, and replace them one by one.  That way, I have a basic idea, right from the start, of where every instrument should be placed in the mix (in terms of gain and pan positions).

So as it stands, it doesn't sound very good!  In fact, it currently comes together as a shrill, expressionless, synthetic cacophony.  The fact that I don't at all enjoy hearing the song in this state, though, is probably a good thing, considering that my idea of a "polished studio sound", applied to my own music, conspicuously used to be exactly that.  Moreover, this has got me thinking more deeply about why I (seemingly) had such a tin ear for production back in the Escapade and Escapade 2 eras.

Like (I'm sure) many people, I found starting out as a composer extremely frustrating.  Time and time again, I'd hear my musical efforts played by real musicians only to be disappointed that it didn't sound at all like it had in my imagination.  It often seemed like I wasn't being taken altogether seriously, although admittedly trying to glorify my student exercises the way I did can't have helped my case.  MIDI, by contrast, cannot say "I'm afraid I can't do that", nor can it question my artistic vision.  Consequently, that shrill, expressionless cacophony of MIDI instruments became, for me, the sound of me being firmly in control of my music.  And so I grew to enjoy it.

Definitely not the case now!  I actually sometimes get a bit nauseous just thinking about the extraordinarily wimpy sound of Escapade.  Sadly this colours my perception of Chronicles of a Dead End a bit, too, particularly on "Days to Midnight", no doubt because that track follows the original arrangement relatively closely.  I find it hard to keep the Escapade and Chronicles versions of the song separate in my mind.

As for Escapade 2, I had become aware by then that the PSR-5700 sounded laughably dated to 2000s-10s ears (it's a 1992 model, by the way), but was still clinging fast to the mindset that the sterile "perfection" of MIDI (filtered through, let's face it, laziness) was a desirable aesthetic for my work.  So while Escapade sounds like it came from a place of extreme confusion (accurate), Escapade 2 just comes off as a massive strop.

One note made all the difference!

Fixing the intro to "Look and See" has provided the most startling illustration I've ever encountered of how in music production, a tiny change can be extremely significant.  The rewritten synth "lead" part now goes up a 6th to a high A-flat, instead of up a whole tone to the alien-sounding Lydian intrusion in previous versions.  (The Lydian mode is my favourite mode, but I'll admit it is challenging to use well.)  Having a bigger ascending interval there makes more sense anyway for another reason: it fits the yearning character of the song.

And with that, the stage is set for the grand finale.  The "Escapade" suite itself is all that remains.  And as of this week, we more or less have confirmation that the thing that required me to keep the piece's length under 8 minutes is going ahead.  More on that later!

It's strictly rhythm

I didn't want to make the guitar cry or sing in "Look and See".  I did, initially, consider having some of the synthesizer passages played on electric guitar, but realized in time that that would have turned the song into a power ballad.  And given that one of this project's aims is to de-cheese an accidental 80s stylization, that's clearly far too risky.

So instead, the guitar's all acoustic on this one.  It starts off double-tracked for a thick texture.  Guitar 2 then drops out at the end of the first "chorus" section, officially starting the song's "decrescendo".  I introduced some further wrinkles into this by having guitar 1 switch between arpeggios and strumming quite freely.

Having said that, adding acoustic guitar to warm up the synthesizer intro ended up revealing how out-of-place some of the dissonance in said intro is.  I'm going to need to rewrite one of those synthesizer parts.  So "Look and See" isn't quite done yet, although I find it amusing that the need to tone down the "experimental" synthesizers is yet more unexpected common ground between this song and "Modern Art"!

This actually won't be the only instance in the song of a synthesizer gimmick from the Escapade version being removed or toned down: in the original there's a four-note descending "music box" bit, at the end of the first chorus, panned hard right with no reverb, thus creating the unnerving impression that the PSR-5700 is whispering in a headphone listener's ear.  In the Escapade 2 version, I transferred this to the piano.  In the Chronicles version, I'm omitting it altogether, as I feel that combined with the busier drum part, it would just create clutter.

Poetry Corner VII

For all that one of my aims, in planning Chronicles of a Dead End, was to strip Escapade of what I have come to regard as a misguided concept, I feel that it's turning out something of a concept album anyway.  It's sort of emerged organically, as while I chose the new running order mainly with a mind to what works musically, this has (broadly speaking) resulted in a most interesting arrangement where the main album's 7 tracks go from least to most personal.  So it's kind of a journey inwards through 7 concentric layers of the mind, or something like that.

In particular, even well before I'd decided on what "Escapade" (the song) should be about, it seemed to me that it and "Look and See" formed a natural pair to serve as the album's conclusion.  Therefore, it feels right to work on both side by side, even if this is actually the result of a lull in my recording schedule for "Look and See".

The difficulty in choosing a coherent lyrical topic for this one lies in the fact that its three main musical "components" each themselves have vastly different inspiration behind them.  One of them, however, is certainly best ignored: the title of "March for the Age" says it all.  If you're going to write a piece of music that bemoans the passing of some nebulously defined cultural "golden age", I think it has to be musically worthy of the best of the age in question to work.  Put another way, a piece with that title has the biggest possible shoes to fill!  In any case, I've (belatedly) learned to be leery of any narrative that asserts that there was ever a "golden age" of any kind.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The second(-ish) component, "My Next/Last Escape", is extremely cryptic but appears to be coming from a similar place to the "past" part of "Look and See", where I felt trapped and unable to move on from the situation described there.  I kept a surprising amount of the original first verse, but discarded the rest without a second thought, in favour of some commentary (from a hopeful perspective) on the relentless bullying that largely drove me into such a state of desperation.

The third component, "After the Party", was inspired by a song called "Last Day", one of the songs written and performed at the Rock Shop department of the 2006 Dartington International Summer School.  I don't remember much about it, other than that it was a (possibly tongue-in-cheek?) mournful commentary on the fact that adolescent relationships formed during a one-off trip away rarely, if ever, outlast said trip, much like Queen's "In Only Seven Days" (from Jazz, 1978).  I may have taken it a bit too much to heart, judging from the fact that "After the Party" blows this basic idea up into a heavy-handed universal lament.

It's undoubtedly true that romantic relationships are as ephemeral as anything else in this thing called life.  What I think "After the Party" fundamentally overlooks to catastrophic effect is that the positive memories we make during our time together never lose their value (well, unless a relationship ends in an exceptionally bad break-up).  Quite the contrary, if anything: any interaction with another person is, in the physical world, manifestly ephemeral, but in the realm of memory, the beauty of that moment is there to reflect on for a lifetime.

It logically follows that the long C-sharp major chord that ends "Escapade" represents not so much a literal interaction with anyone as it does a rush of precious memories coming back to me.  Not just a tacked-on happy ending, then, I hope.

Put it all together, and we have a song about living with the memory of things having seemed hopeless for years on end.  And why, you might ask, is the song (and the original album, for that matter) called "Escapade"?  Because a certain self-appointed expert, back then, once said to me, "You can't really meet someone until you go to university, all you can have before then is escapades".  Even if I was clearly wrong to take the whole teenage romance thing as seriously as I did, I don't think that callous dismissal was quite right either, if only because of the above-mentioned value of positive memories.

Yesterday I saw the light,
I saw so many tried to bring you down,
I wonder how I never knew
Why you're so uptight,
What the bullies shouted wasn't right,
There's someone out here looking out for you.

Stand and face the dawn within,
Don't let idiots tell you how to feel,
They don't know what you've seen.
Can you remember the death of your ordeal?
Was it really just an escapade?

Anyway the rules could bend,
And you somehow made it to the end,
The arbiters have fallen away.
Now your heart is free
To soar into your memory
Of a precious spring you'll taste again, yeah.

Just a moment in the light stretched to eternity,
The memory's still richer than the finest wine.

Stand and face the dawn within...

And with that, the writing side of this project is complete!  This has actually been quite a profound healing journey for me.  For the first time ever, I can and do talk about the Escapade disaster with people in real life.  And because, like it or not, the Escapade disaster is one of the defining events that has shaped the course of my life, that's an enormous burden off my shoulders.

Restraint with the bass

After two consecutive fast songs with very active, involved bass guitar parts, it feels a bit strange to have the instrument back in a supporting role for "Look and See".  This mostly meant having it much less prominent in the mix than it's been in a while - when I first imported the stems, I found they completely swamped the drums!  As with (yet again) "Modern Art", I opted to use the amplifier rather than the DI.

I ended up combining elements of two very different takes here.  The first is a straightforward reading of the part, and the second is, as Bruno put it, "less surgical".  I found that there were points where the expressiveness of the latter take adds welcome warmth to the sound, but others where it just sounds intrusive.

In theory, the song could be considered complete now, as there is no guitar at all in the Escapade or Escapade 2 version of this one.  However, the "decrescendo" I envisioned, as anticipated, doesn't quite come off yet.  With some acoustic guitar to thicken the texture early on, I think it will.

Time gets somewhat muddled here

Besides Escapade, I can't think of many albums where one track has made the complete journey from my least favourite to one I have a particular fondness for.  One that does spring to mind is The Good Son (1990) by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, on which I used to think "The Witness Song" was a low point, just hearing it as long-winded and pointlessly noisy.  That changed when I re-listened to this CD for the first time in years, as it happened, shortly after seeing the 2022 film Elvis.  With that context, the vibe of "The Witness Song" struck me as, basically, the sound of Elvis Presley turning to the dark side.  And I can't not love a song that pulls that off.

"As you can see, young Elvis, your Colonel has failed.  Now you will be the witness when the fog's too thick to see!"

"Look and See" could actually be said to be a song where time gets somewhat muddled, due to the interaction between the past and the present in the lyrics, as well as its reversal of the usual dynamics in this genre.  In order to create enough space in the song for the diminuendo to work, I had to have the drums enter earlier than in the Escapade or Escapade 2 version.  I took the opportunity, however, to adapt both previous drum parts: the rather busy Escapade part for the first "chorus" and an elaboration of the sparser Escapade 2 part for the second verse/"chorus" section.  And as a little something extra, I applied a fade-out to the entire audio of the overhead stems, making the overall drum sound very slowly become less resonant during the song.

A different sort of hybrid

As with "Modern Art", I've opted to hybridize the starkly contrasting Escapade and Escapade 2 versions of "Look and See" for the Chronicles of a Dead End version.  Unlike that one, though, this is more of a case of maximizing the strengths of both previous versions, rather than minimizing weaknesses, even if there are also plenty of those!  After all, it brings me quite a bit of relief to note that, having now prepared the arrangements for all 7 songs, I'll probably never have to listen to anything from Escapade or Escapade 2 ever again in my life.

The hybrid approach is crystallized in the intro.  Here, I've opted for the Escapade approach of 10 bars of lush, symphonic layered synthesizers before the piano enters, rather than having the piano there from the start as in the Escapade 2 version.  However, the melody is played using the exact same Jupiter-santur tone as in the latter, the difference being that I'm actually playing it this time, instead of feeding this not-particularly-difficult line into the Jupiter-80's "MIDI IN" port.

Beyond that, the basic idea behind the arrangement is a kind of progressive scaling down, starting out with almost operatic fervour and gradually diminishing, with the final verse (the "present" part, if you like) being just a very hushed vocal and a sparse piano part.  I can't, off the top of my head, actually think of any other rock or pop song that reverses the usual dynamics in this way!  The parallel that most readily springs to my mind is a classical one: the heartbreakingly beautiful chorus "The Shepherds' Farewell to the Holy Family" from Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ.

The final verse is marked pppp.

In the vocals department, I went for all the theatrical intensity I could muster for the "main" (i.e. "past") part of the song, and also used heavier reverb than usual to emphasize that this is essentially a flashback.  Ultimately how I'll mix this is far from certain, though, as not only are there bass and drums to come, but I've opted for some acoustic guitar to fill out the texture as well.  This seemed to me to match the singer-songwriter elements of this track, which is ironic in view of the fact that (again, like "Modern Art") there's no guitar at all in either previous version.