Taking Another Run At Bitterness

My song "Bitterness" has always been a bit of a thing.  To begin with, it was "The Blade of Bitterness," and it, like many of my older songs, was preachier then than it is now.  It was about something I have since grown tired of people "warning" me about.  You see, in Christian circles, if you show dissatisfaction of any kind, someone is just bound to tell you to watch out for, or do something about your obvious tendency to be bitter.  The bible speaks of a root of bitterness which, springing up, will "trouble" you.  So the word is bible-charged when firing it off at the ground-down, disenchanted, disenfranchised folk who are most vulnerable to it.  Also, if you have any "scars" from the past, someone is likely to tell you you "need healing" for those.  Thing is, as I've said, scars are made of healing, are evidence it has finished happening.

  Still, I wrote this song, heavy-handedly using the image of someone paranoid holding a sharp piece of metal to protect himself, but as it has no handle, he only ends up cutting himself.  Somehow, the song also became about walking around feeling wounded, about feeling like you're bleeding from numerous wounds you can't quite find somehow, including out your eyes, from what you're looking at each day.

  So I wrote the song, happy to have learned an A minor chord and to pair it with E minor, the other minor chord I'd learned.  "What an ominous sound!" I thought.  It also drew a bit from my pretend "bullfight music" that I liked imitating now and then.  In the studio, when it came time to do it, Chris the Engineer hooked me up with someone else he was recording, someone named Chris Lochner, a guy who loved showy acoustic guitar stuff, including flamenco-kinda stuff.  Perfect, Chris the Engineer and I thought.

  Howard the Producer was extremely helpful.  He said his friend Gloria (of Vinyl Delorean) would be delighted to drum for me, that his co-worker Andy would play bass, that he himself would play keyboard, and that he'd get his other buddy in to play electric guitar, once Chris was done playing the acoustic.  "Wait," I asked,  "Am I going to play anything?"  "It's ok.  You just sing," said Howard, fairly condescendingly, I thought.  "Are we really going to put electric guitar on it?" I asked Howard.  "Of course," he said.

  Chris Lochner came in and effortlessly did a bang-up job playing the showy acoustic guitar for me.  Andy Who Worked At The Music Store did a very professional, politely disinterested job of bass parts on three songs for me.  Gloria was nice and played a nice little drum part.  Of course I had to pay each of these guys.  Howard's buddy  didn't show up to play the electric at all, and after making some excuses, neither did Howard.  Because he was supposed to be "producing," by which he meant "organizing and running things and getting people in," this worried me.  Chris the Engineer convinced me that I could just do it myself.  "Need Howard? You REALLY don't need Howard!" was his argument.  "You can do it yourself.  The stuff you're doing on your four-track shows you know as much as half the guys getting paid to record shitty bands in this town.  Do it yourself."  So I did.  But, I ran out of money, lost my job, the recording studio went out of business, and Chris moved away in fairly short order.  I was tempted to be a bit bitter about all that.

  Years later, when I'd switched from four-track to computer, and paid to get those old instrument parts for my studio work put into my computer (they'd sat in my closet on dusty ADAT tapes that I couldn't play, for about five years), I could start adding my own bits.  I did an electric guitar part.  I did trumpets.  I got my sister to do some vocal stuff.  It was all sounding OK, but a bit off.

   I got my brother-in-law to play some additional electric, just to include him and spice up the song with someone else's electric ideas.  In one of my hard drive swaps, I lost his stuff entirely.

  The chorus wasn't quite right, so I got Bill to sing it.  He wasn't happy with what he'd done.  I was kinda happy, but other people didn't think it was quite right.  And the song still sounded a bit off.

  After letting the song sit for a long while, I had a crack at it last year.  I changed the words of the verses and re-sang them. I borrowed a huge conga drum and some little chimes from the music room at school, and put parts of them down, inspired by Santana's Abraxis album.  I asked another teacher, my buddy Jay, to sing the chorus and play some electric on it.  He did that, and I liked his "younger guy's ideas" electric, but his chorus wasn't quite right still.  

  Then this summer I went into the music room abandoned by the recently retired music teacher and played an organ part, recording it as MIDI, and then telling Pro Tools I'd played a Hammond B3 organ through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet.  I felt pleasantly like the Phantom of the Opera.  I was tempted to put my organ part through my rotating Leslie, but the fake version of one was clean and sounded good, so I lazily left it.  I also gave up on other people singing my chorus and just used my own voice, but EQed it to sound like a cheap radio, and put a...chorus effect on my voice during the choruses.  This made a bit of variety, I thought.  The song wasn't bad, and I posted it on here.  It was a bit off, though.  For one thing, the electric guitars were drowning out everything, but weren't sounding "loud" enough no matter how much I turned them up.  That's a problem.

  What I did today, was try to remix it.  Watching a bunch of instructional episodes from Alan Parson (engineer on Dark Side of the Moon and Abbey Road)'s website about recording, I was emboldened to check out the EQing of the guitars and bass and kick drum (and vocals), with a frequency response chart and a theory that I could reduce how much those parts "stepped on each other," and instead have each be assigned a frequency range that suited their sound, and turn down the response at the frequencies they didn't need, but which the others did, while turning up their response on the key frequencies they used to sound like themselves, very pissed off.  I'd attempted that before, but not systematically and successfully.  This time it was like magic.

  It was working gangbusters, but the song was still "off."  The parts weren't glued together.  They were jumbled.  The skeleton at the middle (the rhythm section) wasn't holding the song up.  The more I played and played, the more I realized that the drums (recorded before any electric guitar was added to give a hint that this song could get quite aggressive) were weak and tappy instead of big and smacky.  There was a lot of "tap tappy" going on and no "SWOOOMP!" to turn up.  I played and played with turning things up and down, and EQing, but to no avail.  The drums were vital and they were all tap tappy.  Nothing to be done.  So, I took the kick drum track from Gloria's recording and got it sounding big and turned it right up, melding it with the bass guitar.  I was still missing a snare drum sound that I could respect, though, and it was audibly missing.  The other drum mics were all tappy, and sounded funny if turned right off, so I eventually hauled my snare drum and stand out of the closet, set it up and played a new snare part for the song.  The cat was very alarmed.  I whacked away, secure in the knowledge that Amanda, the cute blonde girl who until recently lived across the hall from me and whom I almost completely succeeded in not talking to or being known by at all, had recently moved two buildings down and would not be deafened by my ridonkulous mid-day drum smackage.  Once recorded, it was rather possible to kind of pretend that the suddenly aggressive snare drum had been played in the beginning with the rest of the drum kit.  It wasn't 100% convincing, so I "went" with that.

  I took the loud snare drum part and did something I've always wanted to try.  Phil Collins popularized this in the 80s, but I didn't want to sound like him:  You take a drum hit, like my loud snare drum.  You put a really giant "Anvil of the Gods" reverb (echo) on it, too big actually, but then you put on a noise gate on that.  The noise gate will give complete silence unless it hears a big drum hit.  It will then "open" and let the drum hit through, and let a bunch of your giant echo mix in briefly into your sound, but then slam shut almost immediately, giving pure silence until another big hit comes through, letting some of that echo in each time like flies into the house when the kids run in and out. This means you have a snare that has all the fullness and WHAM! of a massive drum hit that would cause such a big echo, but now the actually sustaining, annoying, "that guy needs to turn his echo way down" echo has been chopped short.  

  I messed around and messed around, and no doubt things could still be clearer, but as of now, the newly aggressive, whacky snare drum version with the guitars sounding aggressive without completely drowning out the Spanish shakers, conga, chimes, flamenco acoustic and so on, sounds like this.