Artless (featuring The Windscale Blues Experiment)
Notes On "Artless (featuring The Windscale Blues Experiment)"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 74
Sound source: Soprano Sax x 2, Tenor Sax, Oboe by The Windscale Blues Experiment, Presence XT, Impact XT, i (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: May 9 2022 - Jun 24 2022
Concept: Minimal on Basso Continuo
(TM writes:)
This track is based on the concept of “minimal on basso continuo.” Minimal music tends to have a middle- or high-ranged tones as the repeating phrase. What if minimal music is made with low-tone minimal phrases? That was the starting point of this track as well as the whole series.
(*TI talks about basso continuo in the Notes On "This Life Is Just A State Of Mind (featuring STONERJAZZ)".)
In fact, the very first track under such a concept is "North At Defining Moments" (released in July 2022). We found it very interesting and are trying to develop another album, even though it's not going to include "North At Defining Moments", which we intend to put in "The Anomalous Folk" series instead.
This track will be a part of "Auditory Art For Visual Arts", which is a spin-off from that track. To me, at least, this series seems to stimulate artistic images, hopefully for various visual artists**.
Also, I imagined the concept was suitable for collaboration with not only them but also music artists. After having made a couple of tracks (also to be released later) for the series of minimal on basso continuo (MBC), we planned to create an MBC platform so that it could be easy for other artists to collaborate with us.
In "Artless" I thought The Windscale Blues Experiment (WBE) was ideal as the guest, who we would like to play on the platform in that I had another concept in this track. That is to show an artless, countryside, awkward style rather than modern, new, technological, urban, sophisticated image, which most of the electronic music implicitly has.
** If you are one of those interested in using our music in any way, it would be our honour that you could contact us via Facebook Messenger, X direct message or here (at "post your comment" below).
Composition: Odd 3 Beats in 4/4 Time
(TM writes:)
Most of the music I hear today is the simplistic 4/4 time. Why is that? What if 4/4 is treated as 3 beats (without using triplets)? This track is my question like these, on an awkward 3 beats on 4/4 time. (Similarly, in the “The Anomalous Folk” I often used 3/4 and 5/4 times.)
This is how the strange 3 beats in 4/4 time is structured. If one bar is divided into 16 (ie, a 16th note), strong beats are located on the first, sixth, and twelfth like:
"x... .x.. ...x ...."
(Given that x and . mean a 16th note and rest respectively.)
As you may see, the number of the rests in the first interval (between the first and second beats) is four 16ths, the second is five, and the third is four again.
In other words, the time between the second and third beats is longer than the others by 20%. Or, the third beat sounds delayed by 20%. That’s the cause of that oddness.
While the drums join in the middle of the track the rhythm turns to precise 3 beats. This section is not 4/4 time but 3/4 time with the tempo at 84 BPM changed from 112, meaning the speed is reduced by one quarter simply because 4/4 becomes 3/4.
The main rhythmic part is played on the sine wave (on the third and fourth lines above), which is almost a common format throughout the series of "Auditory Art For Visual Arts." In this case you might say the sine wave is in C minor but I made it not sound so simply. That was very tough for the wind instruments by WBE, I presume.
I told him concisely about things like above and he did a superb job. The big difference he can make comes from the depth of his understanding of music as a whole. He is not only technically excellent at the wind instruments.
The high-tone phrase played in the middle of this track is taken from (the first motif in Act 2 of) Romeo and Juliet, the outstanding work by Sergei Prokofiev and written reversely at the double speed (on the top line in the above image). It’s NOT a reverse play but I just wrote it reversely, listening to Prokofiev. (This idea led to my composition of a following track tentatively called "Maurits In The Mirror.")
I love the Romeo and Juliet ballet, by the way, so much that I have been to Covent Garden, London several times. When I first wrote a few bars on the notation, I titled this as "Artless" and since then the title had reminded me of medieval Verona and Juliet. That is why Prokofiev's phrase was brought here.
(TI writes:)
Like the other tracks on "minimal on basso continuo", this track is a decomposition and re-composition of the parts of MuseScore completed by TM, with the only additions made by me being the shoegaze-like distorted guitar parts from the second half to the ending. I added only the distortion guitar part from the second half to ending.
This is also based on a part that TM had made earlier, only arranged somewhat more like a guitar, with the notes removed.
Sound Production: Sound like a reverse playback
(TI writes:)
For the acoustic guitar and piano parts, the playback sampler presets were played as they were, but as described below, the way they sounded and their balance were very finely tuned.
There were four parts to the WBE performance in total, but very little was done - only part in what TM calls 'Prokofiev's reverse playback' was shifted in one place. Other than that, it is completely uncut and unedited.
The 'Prokofiev's reverse playback' was created to sound like a reverse playback on tape, just like that. At first I really tried to make it sound like a WAV played backwards, but it didn't sound like a phrase, so I processed the sine wave, made it sound like a piccolo, rewrote the ENV in the sampler in the opposite direction to the normal ADSR, and further adjusted it so it sounded like a phrase.
Then, by turning on the cassette tape simulator and adding tape noise, I created the feeling of a tape being played backwards.
If a WAV file is really played back in reverse, the phase will naturally be inverted and various inconveniences will occur in the mix.
Fakes that are created to sound more like the real thing are more authentic and practical than the real thing.
For the other parts, as TM writes, it's basically just sine wave. However, I adjust the ENV for each part, creating parts with strong or weak attack, long or short release, and apply individual effects and EQ to each of these parts. This can make it sound like a marimba, a flute or an organ.
Mixing
(TI writes:)
Mixing in the sense of balancing the overall sound was not very time-consuming, but in terms of getting the individual tracks to sound right, we have probably spent more time and thought than ever before. In particular, this time we were able to think more deeply about and examine the use of the compressor in order to make the phrases of each part sound clearer.
In particular, the TM's request this time was to make the phrases sound solid in the acoustic guitar tone. Usually, the theory is that to 'make it sound solid', you have to 'make it sound loud'. However, in this track, there are up to five acoustic guitar parts at the same time, and there are also parts with similar envelopes such as piano in the same register, so if you play everything at a high volume, it is rather difficult to understand what kind of phrase each part is playing, and the volume will soon reach its reach its peak.
Also, for this piece, there are four parts of wind instruments played by the WBE from start to finish. In order to sort these out, more precise localisation and band volume adjustment is required.
The PAN was used to adjust the localisation, and the EQ to adjust the bandwidths, but more detailed compressor adjustment was also needed to organise the front/back and depth adjustments.
In this process, I think I learned a lot about the role of the compressor and how to use it. Specifically, by using the compressor to create depth, we were able to place each instrument in more detail and prevent saturation.
The parameters that can be adjusted with the compressor are the attack and release times, the threshold and the compression ratio. The role of each of these parameters is always mentioned by people explaining 'how to use a compressor',and although I thought I understood it, I have to admit that it had never really clicked with me.
While making various adjustments to this, I realised the most important thing when dealing with Compressor.
That is "how much threshold to apply to the input volume".
The most important thing is to have a good grasp of the volume that is being input". If you want to suppress the excessive input that occurs only for a moment, you need to know the maximum peak time, and if you want to back off overall, you need to know the average input value, and then decide how much you want to suppress it (adjusting the threshold value and compression ratio).
By setting these relative to the other parts sounding at the same time, you can create audible depth.
I have consulted a number of mix and compressor usage websites and found no explicit examples of this "know the input value first and set each parameter relative to that value". (Barely a few examples were found that "the threshold time must be set lower than the input value to get the desired effect").
Then, by adjusting the attack and release time according to the characteristics of the instrument/tone and which part of that sound you want to emphasise or suppress, you can create effects such as 'inconspicuous but phrases can be heard well' or 'phrases sounding like a haze in the distance'.
Knowing these things has made it possible to create a mix where many Guitars and Pianos are sounding at the same time, but the individual phrases can be heard clearly, and the phrases themselves can be heard clearly even when the wind instruments are down behind.
Specifically, by deepening the threshold and keeping the compression ratio slightly high (around 4 to 8 times), while releasing the attack for a moment (making the attack time slightly larger) and immediately suppressing it (making the release time smaller),the contradictory requirement that the phrase itself can be heard well, but not so backwards and inconspicuous, can be cleared as far as possible.
This process also makes the acoustic guitar sound less noticeable, but you can still hear the metallic sound of the attack.
The WBE wind instruments are also not brought forward as much as necessary, and in some cases are moved back, in consideration of overall harmony, but the phrases themselves can be heard clearly.
This is also achieved by making the attack value of the compressor a little louder (delaying the timing of the compression a little), then applying more compression and lowering the sound backwards, which is also successful.
Conversely, for the 'hazy sound behind' type of sound, setting the attack time of the compressor to the lowest and the release time to the highest will make the attack less noticeable and also make the sound sound like it has been moved backwards. Simply turning the volume down simply makes it quieter and harder to hear, but this kind of processing makes it "less noticeable but still sounding (and sounding) solid".
This processing was done on the shoegazey long-toned distortion guitar in the second half of my addition. This sound is by no means as noticeable as the others, but I think it sounds wider and fluffier behind it (I'm quite confident in this processing).
(TM writes:)
Conversely, also early in this track I wrote a guitar phrase but we deleted it in order to highlight WBE's performances more directly.
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