DEC 23, 2020 // GHOSTIE AT 4 AM (VERSION II, PROTOOLS DEMO)

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

You don’t need the notes below. If you have any questions or reservations at all you can call me anytime. Here are my notes for the sake of science:

“Be aware of, know, and communicate with:

1. Yourself.

2. The people you want to connect with.

3. The society that surrounds you both.”

Do you remember who said that? Do you remember that time in Los Angeles when you received criticism for playing a long guitar solo? Do you remember that time when that guy in the car delivered passive aggressive praise of the production quality of the record “Skulls?” What is the value system of those two people who chose to challenge our work? I’ll tell you. They value the appearance of professionalism as established by gatekeepers who maintain a formulaic read on the status quo. They see music as a means to an end. That end, is a sense of captured authenticity and remuneration attained by enacting cynical subservience to the subconscious popular will. They see their talent as an ability to identify the material form of that popular will, and to deliver what it requests. They look down on their listener. The see their art form as a disposable, mechanistic, beast of burden. They are an expensive copy machine, dreaming to be touched by the secretly greasy fingers attached to three generations of law degrees and MBAs.

Do you remember the room in my house where there is a council of flickering, translucent people? Anyway, one of those people told me that the proper response to the people in the paragraph above is to murder them. This is metaphorically speaking of course. (He saw his life in the context of a game.) Violence is no fun. Furthermore the sin of being artificial isn’t necessarily deserving of the death penalty. That being said, I’m sick of people telling me what I’m doing isn’t worthwhile because it doesn’t look or sound like what they saw on proverbial television. I’m sick of cowards looking down their nose at me. I used to think all that killing the competition narrative in songs was for twelve year old numbskulls. This doesn’t seem true anymore. It feels now to be a slightly more sophisticated variety of pleasure, like listening to David Attenborrough narrate bloodshed in nature whilst he chews his peanut butter and jelly into the microphone.

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-I like the way the piano part is married to the guitar part on the verses.
-I like the EQ adjustment I made to the sample, except the high frequency staccato (flute?) gesture is still too loud.
-I like the treatment and function of the vocal chant section. (“Grave, Stone, Lost, Soul")
-I like how this song exhibits an unhinged character that has a hidden message.
-I love the guitar fill and then the D major cord that sounds like the Doors.
-I added drum fills at measures 43 and 51. I believe they are helpful.

✞
-I’d like to do a little filling out of the vocal harmonies and refinement to some of the delivery. (pending what constructive criticism / musical adjustments you might have)
-Arc of song, and specifically of last verse could use some greater focus. I do like some of the overlaps I’ve done, but pulling it back to be more sparse is probably a good idea.
-Like other songs, we’re scheduled to create a less goofy title than the current working one, in this case “Ghosty at 4am.”

👻
-There are three buses for the vocal tracks; a lead vocal bus, a harmony vocal bus, and a chant vocal bus. Each bus is treated differently and allows the different roles to texturally coexist in a way that is interesting is my goal. I don’t think you have the “Space” reverb plug-in which I’m using here in some instances. We can cross this bridge when it’s time to print stems?

-I also created a guitar bus just to help with mixing. Relatedly, the guitar parts I created are two sets of doubled parts. Each pair has one part recorded on the rhythm pickup, and one recorded on the treble pickup, and then panned opposite of each other. I like in general how the guitar serves to bring the music out of a small box and into a room. If it’s fun for you to make adjustments to the guitar parts and replay: Go for it. Or I can fix them based on your requests. Furthermore, the “Amp Room” insert on each of those tracks is a UAD plug-in meant to emulate an amplifier. If you don’t like how it sounds in the reference mix one of us will correct recording /production approach depending on which fork in the road is chosen.

-This session contains my piano trick. This time I’ve given the organ track the same treatment. The effect melds the two instruments into a new one. Both the piano and organ faders are pulled down in the mix, but the fader that sends them to the Aux Track with the Soundtoys / Effect Rack / Telephone is at zero. That’s called Unity gain? The idea is the telephone part outweighs the midi tracks and makes them sound like this is memorial device people playing keyboards or upright pianos in a cold, wet room in Scotland.

((PREVIOUS AND FUTURE VERSIONS))