Let Me Hear About You

Notes On "LET ME HEAR ABOUT YOU"

(From "Boyhood Skies" Series)

The FURICO Music Team - Music Works · Let Me Hear About You

TRACK DATA

Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 6 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 6 Professional

Number of tracks: 74

Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)

Composition and Recording period: Jun 18 2023 - Mar 6 2023

Concept: Tribute to Y Takahashi, who Died in Jan 2023

(TM writes:)

This track was written as a tribute to Yukihiro Takahashi, a Japanese influential musician and one of our boyhood idols, who died on 11 January 2023. He was a synth-pop pioneer and you could also say one of the greatest artists in the genre called "City Pop" in my view.

Even though I know, of course, that he was gone, I'd just like to hear about him. So sad and so grateful. Apart from him, you may have someone you'd like to hear about but you know you can't. You may mumble something like the title towards the winter sky. That's what I mean by the title. (A half of Japan, by the way, sees very clear skies in winters typically. TI said the track had a "blue-sky feel." That's exactly what I aimed.)

I was shocked to hear that Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takahashi-san's close colleague and friend, is struggling with stage 4 cancer, and we, FMT, were creating some tracks for our love to him. Meanwhile, even more shockingly, Takahashi-san's news came through. (Just around the release of the track, Sakamoto-san passed away too in March 2023.)

So, the concept is to express how much we'd like to pay tributes to him in his or City-Pop manners mixed with FMT's features. The work itself seems to have a lot of the 1980s tastes but we wanted the whole sound to be rather like the 1990s. Anyway, Takahashi-san was influenced by British "New Wave" at that time and I intended to make it a little close to its vibes.

In addition, one thing I was wondering is that it would have been far differently arranged from what it is if I had composed and arranged with such an instrument as a piano. When I played it on a piano the other day (after it was mostly finished), I had intuition to arrange it alternatively. But once I got the piano arrangement onto the notation, it didn't sound that interesting. This whole story seemed to tell me about what digital music is in essence.

Composition: Complexity of City Pop & FMT

(TM writes:)

The musical style of this piece is like my "home ground" or nostalgia. It's sad that most of today's Japanese people are not musically influenced by the country's artistic old tradition, just like us, but you could say the City Pop is one, which is quite true.

TI talked about an analogy of Hayashi Rice, which is a dish popular in Japan and is like hashed beef with demi glace and rice. That was originally imported perhaps around 1900 from Europe and arranged or localised, but Hayashi Rice is delicious in a way different from hashed beef with demi glace as such. It's been uniquely evolved over the years. There are so many things like that in the country. City Pop is just like Hayashi Rice. In the 1970s or so mainly American music was imported there, localised and mixed with the influence from the Beatles, jazz and other music.

I designed especially the chorus like (my interpretation of) City Pop. Actually, I added it later, which I found fit in this work out of my stock of composed phrases. I first wrote it on 16 May 2022 in a very different style from how it is now, which was much weirder as well as trickier. Those sections don't have Takahashi-san's vibes at all, but I re-arranged it in some City-Pop manner to some extent and put its non-Takahashi features into the piece intentionally in order to express our love to him with a lot of tonalities (relatively within our works) and not to resemble him too much.

Like many City Pop songs, the chord progression is complex and attractive to me. The bass follows the D major scale but begins with C-sharp, moving to F-sharp, G, A and B, and then to D, G and A -- very likely D major.  When it's C-sharp the piano plays A-sharp, G-sharp and D-sharp, none of which follows the D major scale. It's the second, fourth and sixth degrees, much like usual FMT. (Similarly, before that in the "verse" sections, though no verses, the bass plays C-sharp and F-sharp centrally.)

Then, it moves to F#m7 with the 9th, which is tonal, and next to something like G9 (slightly with the augmented fourth but without the third　-- which is like DM7 on G). It goes to A9 with the augmented fourth again (or EM7 on A), which means a parallel motion. In general there are many cases of them from, for instance, D major to E major, but I don't remember I've heard parallel motions of such complex chords as "G9 with 3rd omitted and +4" to "A9 with 3rd omitted and +4." That's funny enough for me.

Nevertheless, the basic progression of dyads is relatively simple: a two-bars pattern of A# & D#, C# & E, A & F# and B & G#. If you focus on the top notes, it plays D#, E, F# and G# -- like ascending stairs -- but it's major 7th, 9th, major 10th and augmented 11th. It's remained unobvious but as simple but as complex as that.

Even though the chorus is repeated three times, each of them is different thanks to key changes. The first one continues the D major scale, whilst the second begins with the D-flat major scale and returns to the D major. The last one plays the D major two times and after that it moves to the D-sharp major and goes further to the E major.

Honestly, I didn't write it intentionally like that, but during the production I analysed it afterwards. What I wrote first was just two dyads on a piano. So, it's a little bit like City Pop but also like FMT, in terms of atonal (or suspended) chords, augmented fourths, lots of 9ths and key-changes/transpositions as well as parallel motions.

In the other sections I designed many of his vibes, which I love so much but I'm not going to talk about too much. But just one thing I would like to mention is that the key is C-sharp in the verse sections where lots of major 2nds, 4ths, minor and major 6ths as well as major 7ths are used (especially on the guitars). Those are common with what first appear in the chorus but it shifts to the D major scale, meaning what we call trans-scaling. It's only the interlude section that purely follows the D major scale like DM7 and GM7.

In the verse section and what may be called the bridge sections the scale is close to C-sharp major. In there, many 3rds (F), 5ths (G-sharp) and 7ths (C) are frequently used, all of which are likely dissonant with the overall scale of D major. 

It's based on some Pops form and sounds like some Pops song, but it radically isn't; FMT's way, instead.

Oh, I forgot talking about the groove... Takahashi-san's works have many, many cool grooves. In this track it's a little bit closer to his than to FMT's in my view, but those influenced on FMT's a lot anyway. On this particular work, his songs called "Kill That Thermostat" and "Bokuha Unmei Wo Shinjinai" could have influence subconsciously. (It didn't intentionally, though.)

The ambience of people talking was added finally in order to imply his amiable personality.

(TI writes:)

[Composition]

I added some arpeggio phrases on a synthesizer (probably Roland Jupiter 8), which was a characteristic of the music of the time, to the score created by TM, and added some cutting phrases on the piano to accentuate the rhythm.

When I saw the TM score for the arpeggio, I knew I had to include it in the middle section, where there is a guitar phrase reminiscent of Kenji Omura of yesteryear, and it fit perfectly.

The guitar and tone are a perfect homage to "Something In The Air". The "blue sky atmosphere" was also inspired by the scene change in the music video where the blue sky cuts in. This blue sky scenery reminds me of the time when I was taking a walk in the countryside outside of Yokohama, where I lived at that time (1980s-90s).

[Mixing]

As TM explains, the sound was created with the 1990s in mind.

Specifically, the sound is like the sound of a car stereo at that time. In particular, the lo-fi feel at the beginning is inspired by the sound of a car radio.

However, it was very difficult to create the "atmosphere of those days. I think I have a complete image of the sound in my mind, but I already knew what was missing and what I could not reach because I had the image.

What was clearly missing, and what seemed to be unachievable, was "the atmosphere of live instrumental performance," especially in the Guitar and Saxophone. At that time (1980's to 90's), keyboards, bass, and drums had already been replaced by programming, and mixes were being done in such a way that the atmosphere was not different from that of programming, but for guitar and saxophone, live performance was (and still is) the mainstream. It was very difficult to create the same atmosphere with programming.

And now, when I listen again to the sounds that seemed mechanical at the time, I realize that many of them were played live in the studio. Every single sound is clearly audible and has a different presence. The number of parts probably fits within the 24-track limit, so the dynamic range of each individual instrument was well maintained, and the recording and mixing was done by excellent engineers on a generous budget.

In the usual FMT sound, our top priority is to have a sound that is appropriate to our concept, and we are not concerned at all with simulating live instruments.

We thought about asking some of the live instrumentalists who have cooperated with us to play this piece, but it was difficult for them to understand the concept (Citypop of the 1980s and 1990s in Japan), and also the original concept of FMT (composing with sheet music, not relying on coincidence) ,so we created the music by ourselves.

Therefore, for the first time, we used the "technique switching function" for guitar, bass, and saxophone. For example, on the guitar, we not only input the pitch and length of notes, but also "Mute," "Slide," and "Legato" information one by one.

This is a very standard method in DTM, but this is the first time I have used it in FMT.

I have never played guitar or bass before, so I created the track by imagining how I would move when I played the guitar.

Also, for the keyboards, I started using a free YAMAHA DX7 simulation software called "Dexed" from this song.

I used to dislike the sound of FM sound sources when they first came out.

But now, when I try this kind of sound, I discover that there are sounds that can only be produced with this kind of software, and that it is still a good sound.

As for the drums, we used a lot of limiters and made them tighter. The original drum sound was very natural and more "resonant," but I used the "Limiter" to suppress the peaks and "Gate" to cut off the reverberations to create a tighter sound. Then, the toms were given a gate reverb, which was a characteristic sound of the time, and reverb was also applied to the overall sound.

I simulated these techniques by recalling articles in recording magazines I was reading at the time. Studio One has a complete set of internal functions, even for expensive equipment that I could not afford at the time, and I made many discoveries during the simulation.

Listening to the whole thing, I think it's extremely dry. If you re-listen to the sound of those days with the mix in mind, you will notice that the sound of those days actually had more reverb on it. However, our music has many more tracks than back then, and too much reverb can blur the sound image, so we try to keep it as dry and sharp as possible, and add reverb as an accent.