Uh Uh

Track four from Inchoatery. More Microkorg than you can shake a stick, and a lot of other changes from the demo I posted last month.

Looking at the list of gripes I had in the demo post, I hit most of them with the final recording, more or less; this is definitely much closer to what I had in mind when I started thinking about the song.

It's a much more elaborate mix than the demo; I'm hoping that I managed to keep the energy of the final up despite it being less raw and live of performance than the demo by necessity was.

The steady-tonic vocoder verse rehash in the break in the middle is the main new thing structurally.

• play
• pause
• stop
• min volume
• max volume

posted by cortex (8 comments total)

Really nice stuff...love the light punch of the beat throughout, and I enjoy the vocal section very much. I have a few comments, if you don't mind some criticism from a non-expert:

- First off, the song seems to skip/fall of beat at around the 2:30 mark. Maybe a recording error?

- The beginning of the bridge (~1:22) seems to fall off beat and get a bit too "busy". The concept seems worthwhile, but there's something a bit disjointed about it.

- Your vocals are great, but is there a way to make them come out louder and crisper? Maybe this is the sound you're going for, but adding a bit of punch might make for a better sound.

Hope I've helped a bit. Great work!
posted by hiteleven at 9:13 AM on March 4, 2010

Very nice.
posted by Zenabi at 9:49 AM on March 4, 2010

There's a lot of moments of rhythmic looseness at various points in the song, yeah.

The launch of the bridge at 1:22 is less tight, and less epic, than I'd have liked, but practically speaking I ran out of time to nail it. It's the sort of thing that, done live, I'd want to be a great big moment. The tightness of the bridge all in all is less than what I hoped for, but trying to do something really burstingly fast and busy on a bunch of instruments like that was asking for trouble.

The mushiness at 2:30 is just me being a lousy timekeeper still. I patched a couple of worse and more easily-fixed issues surgically on this song and on some of the others on the album, but I was so ear-blind by the end that little things like that still snuck through.

Vox are about on level with the rest of the album, which was my main concern.

This is definitely the sort of song that would be worth a careful revisit some time to try and really nail.
posted by cortex at 9:59 AM on March 4, 2010

I have no critique to offer except I love the whole album.
posted by rtha at 11:27 AM on March 4, 2010

Vox sound better on my headphones...I played the song originally on my laptop speakers, which was, well, stupid. But no, they fit nice.

As for the bridge, if you can't make it as tight as you'd like, maybe it would be worth keeping the rhythm in? I'm just saying because in your last version of this track you said you wanted something "ass-shaking", and a pause followed by a not-quite-epic burst of noise kind of takes the jump out of that part of the song (but it picks up again nicely ~1:35).

Of course these are nitpicks, I hope you understand.
posted by hiteleven at 12:39 PM on March 4, 2010

Yeah, no, absolutely. Nits are for picking, dissection is always welcome.

I tend to do a lot of my mixing work in headphones, falling back to my meh home stereo and computer speakers for spot-checks sometimes but all in all it leaves me vulnerable to final mixes that don't hit compromise situations as well as they could.

I tend mostly to worry about how a song sounds when I'm listening to it the way I want to: loud, either in nice cans or through a stereo that can do loud without flinching.
posted by cortex at 12:48 PM on March 4, 2010

Hell, ya. I'll be listening to the rest of the album tonight. This kicks ass and (is it too obvious to mention?) it has a lot of great late '70s early '80s elements in it. New Waveish a little?

Digging it man!
posted by snsranch at 4:10 PM on March 5, 2010

Vocoder FTW! One of my favorites of the bunch. An outstanding RPM submission!
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 12:01 AM on March 11, 2010