Mood Of Two & The Mighty Himalayas
Notes On "MOOD OF TWO" & "THE MIGHTY HIMALAYAS"
We would like to specially express our excitement with surprise as well as gratitude to Teth Sin and Stonerjazz, who developed this "Mood Of Two" track into their fabulous work called "The Mighty Himalayas" linked below.
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: Instrumental Part 32, Final Mix 40
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Jan 9 2021 - Feb 18 2021
[TM: Concept and dedication]
(TM writes:)
The track "Mood Of Two" is a piece of the clear concept of "electro-swing with atonal, ambiguously-pitched, percussive sounds."
I like electro-swing very much, but swing or jazz in general relies upon tonal sounds. I love that but have not heard percussion-centred swing. There should be some, but I would like an intentionally- and complexly-intertwined one (rather than improvisational).
Here, the groove is centred, having multiple aspects. One is strong beats on Beats 2 & 4. Another is strong beats on Beats 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 & 4.5 (where Beat 1 means the very first point of the bar), ie, the double beats. The other aspect is syncopation, which is made independent to a certain degree with the other two aspects. That is a summary of the groove structure.
The tentative title was "Double Beat Swing." "Two" in the title reflects the double beats, although "Mood Of Five" implies five-notes modes (and additionally later, "Mood Of Three" came from three types of drum kits used). So "Mood Of Two" is not about two modes or two-notes modes, but about the double beat. Anyway, we had no plan to put these pieces together into the single "Mood" series when making them, but I thought it could be interesting to gather two tracks with very different and not-related features and concepts.
The word "mood" in the swing music reminds me of "In The Mood" by Glenn Miller (Orchestra). I don't know if he musically influenced on me or not, but I feel he is a very special person, because my father loved his music so much. From his youth just after World War Two he had yearns for the United States. Glenn Miller was a... or THE symbol of his yearns. The first dating he had with my mother was the film "The Glenn Miller Story", I heard. As both my parents passed away around a decade ago, contemplating the title of "Mood Of Two" (after the production) strongly reminded me of them. I would like to dedicate this piece to the two. (I would do so no matter how much they understood and liked this!😄)
[TI: Acid Jazz as I imagined it, more complex Kirk Degiorgio].
(TI writes:)
In the 1990s, the Acid Jazz genre emerged. I thought it was a new type of jazz, a completely new type of music that I had never heard before, like Acid House, which came out a little earlier than Acid Jazz, but it was a selection of jazz-rock, B-grade jazz, and fusion music from the 60s and 70s, or music that was sampled and combined from those sources.
There were some good songs and artists that I hadn't heard of before, but I was disappointed to find that it wasn't "new music" in the least.
The "acid jazz" I imagined was probably the kind of music I created this time.
I also loved the music of "AS ONE" (Kirk Degiorgio). I was especially attracted to the beats and chord progressions he created in his early days. I wanted to hear something that was more developed and musically complex. The only way to do that would be to create it myself.
So, I decided to take advantage of TM's memo and create a song like that.
[Composition]
(TI writes:)
This track is based on a motif that we created in collaboration with another artist. We decided to leave it to him to do what he wanted and create our own version of it.
The starting point of the track was a memo that TM wrote on the rhythm parts, bass line, and some instrumental parts. The concept is "Double Beat Swing", which means to express multiple Grooves with 4 rhythm parts.
So, even though it was co-written with another person, I tried to keep the instrumental parts as low as possible, and arranged it in such a way that the rhythm and bass line would stand out.
I only added the piano cutting, the band harmonies above the long tones sounding on the organ and solina, and a little phrase at the ending. It's like a little bit of the icing on the cake.
(TM writes:)
One morning, perhaps around New Year's Day of 2021, I suddenly remembered one night when I was a student. I went out to a club in Tokyo with my friends, where it played what I wanted to call "hard swing." I felt extreme enthusiasm in me and was shocked by the double beat that I then recognised.
I wrote four parts for the percussion from the beginning: a rhythm box, drum machine and strong/weak human drum kits. The structure is as I have written above in the Concept section.
The important motif on the percussion came from my fingers lightly hitting a table (almost subconsciously) like this:
Onto these I added up the piano, organ and bass. My intention then was unnatural tonal parts like cut and pasted a little bit carelessly. There seems some chord progression pattern slightly, but it's somewhat broken. So there is no direct connection between the bass and harmonies so that it sounds like "tonal but atonal in total."😁
In terms of the overall structure, I made it like foreshadowing. I cease explaining further on it. Enjoy finding it out.
[Mixing]
- Mix Procedure
This track was basically created with the intention of having just the bassline and rhythm, and the number of sounds was full with just the bassline and rhythm.
The number of tracks is 32 for the instrumental part without the drums and bass, which is not a lot for our songs. The final mix has 40 tracks (38 tracks with rhythm and bass), half of which are rhythm and bass parts and half of which are instrumental parts.
- Mixing and Equalizing
Therefore, the ratio of the rhythm and bass parts is much higher than in a normal song, and the sound is concentrated in the low frequency (below 100Hz) and high frequency (above 5kh), making the mix very difficult.
In particular, the low frequency range is harder to localize left and right in the auditory sense than the high frequency range, so it is necessary to segregate them by bandwidth.
So I started by listing each sound, identifying the band that would play each sound, and then cutting the overlapping bands in the other parts.
In the early stages of the mix, it was a matter of alternating between the Analyzer and Equalizer graphics and making adjustments.
Studio One's parametric equalizer allows me to specify low cut, high cut and up to three shelving points, but that wasn't enough, so I inserted multiple equalizers into the track and adjusted them.
It was as if I was doing a line drawing with the equalizer. I think I've gotten much better at creating curves for the equalizer.
- Compression
Similarly, I had to pay attention to placement rather than bandwidth. The placement of the left and right sides can be adjusted relatively freely and easily with the PAN, but the depth is very difficult.
Depth is expressed with the Equalizer and Compressor, and I think I finally learned some techniques for expressing depth with the Compressor this time.
To be honest, I didn't have a good grasp of how to use the compressor until then.
At best, I could only suppress loudness, and there were many ambiguities in how the various parameters affected the sound.
In the first place, the part of the sound that each parameter affects and how it affects it depends on the tone, and the expression of depth depends on the combination of other sounds.
The principle of sound is that nearby sounds are sharper and louder, and the opposite is true for distant sounds, but the perceived sharpness is related to the bandwidth and the speed of the attack. What to do depends on each individual case, but I think you can now have a rough idea of what band to use in the equalizer to suppress this sharpness, or what attack, release time, threshold, and compression ratio to use in the compressor.
- About the tone
As for the tone, I started by creating the sound for the part that TM had created in advance, based on the specification that he wanted it to sound like this.
For the instrumental, the organ sound was particularly important, and I used a lot of rotary effects this time.
Most rotary effects for organs are reproductions of Leslie speakers, but I have been using Leslie speakers since I was a kid, so I knew the real sound very well.
It's very difficult to get that feeling with digital effects alone. In particular, something like "air ringing" is very important, and although there are parameters to produce it, using them inevitably makes the sound distant and the attack disappears.
In actual Leslie speakers, the attack does not disappear so much. On the other hand, it doesn't have the extreme spaciousness of the Digital effect.
Since rhythm is important in this track, the attack is very important, so I added a separate organ sound with loud clicks in some places to compensate.
- About Rhythm (in terms of sound creation and combination, especially for the low frequency parts (bass drums and bass, etc.))
For the mix, as mentioned earlier, it was important to distinguish between bandwidth and depth, but for the tone, it was very difficult to create a solid attack and strength.
Especially in the bass section (mainly bass drum), there are a series of phrases with fine note values, so in order to improve the grain of these phrases, it was necessary to select the tone itself and finely adjust the attack and release time of the tone. In particular, in many cases, the release time was too long even if the release time of the tone itself was set to zero, so I had to shorten the audio data itself, in addition to shortening the note value itself or inserting an external gate effect.
Similarly, to weaken the attack, I used the attack time parameter of the compressor, since the attack time of the sampler or the envelope generator of the synth could not be fully expressed.
Also, since I used a sample of a wood bass for the bass this time, the range of the bass was lower than that of an electric bass, even with the same notation, so it clashed with the bass drum band (50-200Hz) and required a lot of adjustment.
In real performances, the bass drum doesn't carve the rhythm very finely in the type of music where wood bass is used a lot and the phrases move finely (Jazz, for example). I noticed that this is a natural way of playing so that the bandwidth does not overlap.
Similarly, the organ part creates percussive rhythms in the low frequency range, so I needed to clarify the combination and segregation of the parts.
As a result of various tests, I decided that the organ should be centered at 200Hz, the BD should have low frequencies from 50Hz to 100Hz, and the attack should be placed around 200Hz. The bass is placed an octave lower than the electric bass and an octave lower than the bass drum, and only the attack and pitch-sensitive overtones are played higher than the BD.
In the latter half of the piece, the bass drum's continuous beat was a trial-and-error process, as it sounded unnatural if the release was too short but connected if it was too long.
At first, I tried to modify the attack, release, and pitch of the bass drum sound in the main phrase, and I also sampled a sound that I had TM record that was close to my image. In the end, instead of using the bass drum sound, I used a marimba sample played in the BD band to express the lingering attack and release, and combined it with a sine wave sample in the same band to create the swelling.
If you think about it, playing four different rhythm parts at the same time would completely saturate the sound in terms of bandwidth, making it very hard to record, and even if you could, it would not sound right.
Imagine four drummers playing a full set of drums at the same time.
For the rhythm kit, I combined a set of TR808s, a set of PCM drum machines (I tried several, but ended up with a set based on TR909 samples combined with several PCM drum machine samples), and a set of live drums.
The high frequencies above 1kh also overlap with the solina, organ, piano and hi-hat bands. There are also three hi-hat tones, and since the high frequencies of the instrumental parts are played in long tones, it becomes difficult to hear the hi-hat when played normally.
Therefore, for the high frequency range of the instrument part, I pinpointed the characteristic band of each hi-hat tone and cut it down.
However, the band where the hi-hat characteristically sounds is very narrow, and the pitch is constant, so just pinpointing and shaving is enough to make it sound good.
I am proud of the fact that I can hear the long-tone instrumental parts in the high frequency range sounding well, but I can also hear the rhythm of the hi-hat well.
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