Newfangled Hotel Ambience 5: Me And My Shadow

Notes On Newfangled Hotel Ambience 5: Me And My Shadow




TRACK DATA

Newfangled Hotel Ambience 5: Me And My Shadow

Composition tool: MuseScore3, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks:  33

Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER

Composition and Recording period: Aug 16 2021 - Oct 4 2021







Me And My Shadow (Home Version)

Composition tool: MuseScore3, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks:  62(1st), 2(2nd)

Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER

Composition and Recording period: Aug 16 2021 - Sep 2 2021





Concept

(TM writes:)

While the Newfangled Hotel Ambience series (or album) has had the concept of a band playing music with new attractiveness in a hotel lounge, the tracks gradually break it. 5: Me And My Shadow is almost something we don't know if can be performed live. The minimal, sequencer-like phrases, complex poly-rhythms, atonality/chordlessness and unpredictable, gimmicky progression - all of these are FMT's features. I think this track has the most of them in the series.

In a sense, 5: Me And My Shadow has been made to symbolise what I call FMT's "2021-esque" music. I designed the notation to show what reminded us of the tracks "Here I Am" and "The Beginnings", the first ones of our 2021-esque music.

Moreover, this track aims to be more electronic, as I often want to hear more like the electronic music every time when I listen to live performance. That is why the piece has many parts like playing "very electronic" phrases live, which sound so great to me. That is the concept of the track.



Composition

In composing the eight tracks of the series, within which two are yet to be released at the moment, I had the images of the scenes. 5: Me And My Shadow and 7: The Quaint Dream are the only tracks for which I had images of only one person. In particular, I love to work alone with the PC (with which I am writing this) in a hotel room or café especially when I have tasks that require a lot of deep thinking as well as creativity and must concentrate on it. I don't want to be interrupted by telephones, Zoom meetings or even text messages like emails. Being unconnected with Wi-Fi is alright. If you have experience like that you must understand the fun I am talking about.

Sometime I hope to do that just for composition or production of music, especially when making an extra track for the Newfangled Hotel Ambience series. It will be funny enough if "I am making this music just because I want to hear it now here in the hotel." (I had an opportunity like that just a week ago (before writing this text) in a hotel in Osaka, Japan, but it was so short time.)

Poly-rhythms have in general the main and subordinate rhythms, but in the middle of this piece the percussion that played the main role turns out to be the subordinate for a while. The time signature shifts to a pattern of 6/8, 6/8 and 9/16 and it finally goes to 16/16 in the 106th bar. I just wanted to insert a break there and tried to find out its most suitable length. After I tried 12/16, 13/16 and so on, I eventually found 16/16 was it. It was very funny. 4/4 would have been enough but I left 16/16, as you can see in the notation video on YouTube (to be released soon), if you would like to.


(TI writes:)

For the original NHA version, TM's score was almost complete, so I only added conflicting melodies and solo-like phrases in the gaps. For this song, I focused more on interpreting the score rather than creating or adding phrases.

What I find interesting and what I like about this song is that it's simple and it's a combination of different sized and self-similar parts that make up a groove. Each one of them is simple, but when they are put together, they create a taste.

This kind of music may be considered as Minimal Music, but this song is different from that, it has structure, development and interesting sound. There's a bit of a mid-period Talking Heads feel to it (Remain In The Light), as well as our own "Fractal" structure.

However, the interesting thing about NHA Series is that it's a track that doesn't express itself in minimal music, so I tried not to emphasise that. And I think I showed my taste in this song by making it a "Home Version".

The reason why I created this "Home Version" is that the NHA series follows a unified concept of sound creation, and the uniqueness of the music itself can be obscured by the concept of the NHA series, so I created this version to emphasize this part.

We believe that the ability to separate the interest of the music from the interest of the expression is a peculiarity of the type of music that does not rely on human performance, such as ours.



Mixing


For this song, the Home Version was completed first. I was mistaken about this fact. I thought that I had made the NHA version first, but that I had made the Home Version to make it more personal (to create a sound that I wanted to listen to more). When I checked my records to write this note, I found that the Home Version was completed a month earlier, and the NHA version a month later.

From there, I went back in my memory and remembered that the Home Version was the first thing that came to mind and that's where I started working on the track.
In other words, at the stage of the MuseScore score, "I didn't know how to put this song into the format of the NHA version" (which I remember that too). This will be discussed later, but the main reason was that the structure of the music as a piece was not suitable for music that was intended to be played live approximately, specifically, there would be obvious discrepancies in the mix.

In a word, the sound is too concentrated in the bass part. If you actually played this song with a live band using live instruments, the acoustics would probably be unbearable to listen to. There are ways to deal with this acoustically, but no matter how much processing you do with live music and live instruments, certain bands will inevitably become saturated.

The reason for this is not that the individual parts have a lot of low frequencies, but that the arrangement has a lot of notes in each of the individual parts, and that there are many other parts such as piano, vibraphone, organ, etc. that contain the bass part's range. This kind of arrangement will probably be requested by the performers and the PA staff at the rehearsal stage.

Therefore, the key to the mix was the treatment of the bass part. In the Home Version, the specific procedure was to sort out the overlapping bands on each track (part). For example, when the bass is playing, the piano's range is cut.

The piano in particular contains a lot of overtones, so it's not so noticeable to the listener if certain areas are cut. In the case of the bass, the Groove, Harmony and Bass are all in different registers, so if you emphasise only the parts that are needed, you can recognise the bass sound even if you don't use all the registers, and it doesn't bother the listener.

Many of the tones have been replaced from the NHA version. In particular, many of the drum sounds have been replaced, especially the bass drum, which has a completely different sound. The bass drum part in this song is not only attacking, but also harmonic, and I tried to adapt it to the longer notes in the score. I tried to match it, but the live BD is not that long, so it doesn't have enough sustain, so I replaced it with a synth BD in this version. I also layered four different bass drum sounds and changed the way they sounded in different places. If you listen to it on a sound system with a good low end, you can hear the bass drum gradually changing its sound.

In the end I added a solid non-effects sound and mixed it so that it sounded half as loud. In the Home version, I could have just EQ'd the sound, but doing the same in the NHA. In the Home version I could have just EQ'd the acoustics, but doing the same with the NHA version would not have given the feel of live music and instruments.

The concept also calls for some reverb. In this case, we prioritised the "sound of the instrument" and cut out the parts that didn't fit the sound of the instrument. As a result, the sound doesn't have the groovy feel of the Home Version, but it does have a live band feel that a live band can't have. I think that was probably TM's intention too.


Comments

Post a Comment