jemenake
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Good evening, Mr. Sucks!
I’m a music teacher here in California. One of my students can play a variety of instruments so one of the things we do nowadays is pick a song and he reproduces all of the tracks, one by one, until he has remade the entire song. We’ve done some Beatles, some Raconteurs, etc. He likes Brad Sucks, so we’ve done Borderline and now we’re putting the finishing touches on “Making Me Nervous”.
Problem is, he’s a little obsessive, so he’s always trying to get everything *just* right. We’ve spent the last several lessons just going through every patch in every synth in Sonar 7, trying to get the bass sound right. Care to share with us what synth patch you used for the bass line?
Next, we’ve noticed that, at about 58 seconds into the song, you introduced something which sounds a little bit like a tambourine or tiny finger cymbals. What are those? And are they playing on the beat or on every eighth note?
Lastly, am I hearing that right, that you ran one or both of your doubled vocals through a one-octave-up pitch shifter?
Many thanks in advance,
- Joe
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growyoyorhino
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Where in California are you, no teacher ever did things like that with me, I’d love to do something like this
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jemenake
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Arroyo Grande, near San Luis Obispo. We discuss various recording techniques (for example, in the case of “Making Me Nervous”, which is almost all MIDI/synth/sequence stuff, I made him decide whether to play those distorted guitar phrases in directly from a real guitar or to use a synth patch with MIDI. He chose MIDI and then he had to decide whether to start right off with a distorted guitar patch or to start with a clean guitar patch and then run the synth through an amp-modeling or distortion effect).
It’s kinda turning into a “how to be a recording engineer” lesson. I tell him about filters (high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, notch), dynamic versus condenser mics (and why phantom power is needed), +4 and -10 dB gain references, why you use compression on vocals, why distortion/overdrive inherently has its own compression, why triangle and square waves sound more harsh than sine waves… I basically just get to core-dump everything on know onto the kid for 45 minutes at a time. :)
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Brad
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Hey Joe, that’s really cool. I also would have loved something like this as a kid.
Not sure if you have it or not, but it might help to grab the source to get a closer listen to the tracks:
http://media.bradsucks.net/source/making_me_nervous-120bpm.zip
To answer your questions:
1. I honestly can’t remember what I used for the bassline. I seem to recall I was playing into a phrase sequencer or an arpeggiator or something. All I did was play the root notes (D, F, G) and the VSTi played the pattern. I know the lead synth is Triangle I (http://www.kvraudio.com/get/128.html) so maybe I used a midi arpeggiator and stuck it into that but I dunno. Let me know if you figure it out.
2. Those are tiny little tamborine 16th notes. The even notes are quieter than the odd notes, which is a habit I picked up back in the old Tracker days.
3. That’s a formant pitch shifter. I used an old one called (I think) RBC Voice Tweaker. It might be the same as this one: http://www.xponaut.com/?q=node/21 but I’m not sure. In Making Me Nervous it’s mixed fairly subtly into the vocals to add a bit of interest to my boring voice.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions and good luck!
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EleosFever
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brad what are you using right now for bass?
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Brad
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Depends on the song, but mostly I just go through Guitar Rig.
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