Newfangled Hotel Ambience 6: Mad Disco

Notes On Newfangled Hotel Ambience 6: Mad Disco



TRACK DATA

Composition tool: MuseScore3, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks:  41

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

Composition and Recording period: Aug 21 2021 - Sep 5 2021





Re-Arranging "Mad Disco"


(TM writes:)

I was thinking which past work of FMT's would be interesting and attractive if re-arranged for the Newfangled Hotel Ambience series, as I had a plan to do so. An unplugged version of Mad Disco would be the one. The motif bass would be played in the wood bass whereas the percussion plays somewhat quite differently from the original version. The piano, guitar and brass section should be well fit to the very acoustic rhythm.

I wrote it on a completely new notation, rather than copying the phrases from the original version. While the original score had been made on MuseScore 2, I used MuseScore 3 for this. One of the biggest difference between the two software versions is the sound of percussion and I thought writing newly on MS3 would enable us to make differences. 

Sometimes composers just write phrases and think which instrument suits them, but sometimes they first fix the instruments and write suitable phrases thereafter. I go for the latter mostly. For me the differences in the percussion sound have a large impact on composition itself. What will the work be like if the latter musician re-write an identical track with a set of different sounds? That was the question to myself.

If you have interests in our composition of this piece I would like you to see the notes on the original version. When composing it, I was thinking that Mad Disco suits live performance. The main motif is the bassline and the others are involved with it. (Especially in this version I love the vibraphone.) Because "the main motif is the bassline" the track has no keys, chords, or tonalities. Although atonal musicians tend to make their music frightening and spooky, atonality can make it fun, attractive, and even suitable for such specific sites as social space in hotels. Mad Disco is the symbol of that, in my thought.


(TI writes:)

I didn't do much in terms of arranging this track, because the original track was already well written and TM had already made a basic arrangement for this version.

The only thing I did in terms of arrangement was to add the solo part that I added in the "LONGMIX" of the same track to the one TM created, rewritten for the vibraphone.



Mixing

For the NHA series, it wasn't difficult because the concept was to follow the same mix format for the whole series, and this song had already been arranged to sound like a band performance.

However, for this song, TM wanted to use a wood bass, and there was no good sound in the library, so it was difficult to create a sound for that part.
In the end there were very few options, so I used a wood bass sample from Studio One and applied a short reverb and EQ'd the lingering short reverb at 200Hz and the attack at 2kHz.

At the MIDI stage, I rewrote the articulations of the instruments in detail, converted the MIDI data to Wav, and then fine-tuned the dynamics. 

The mix and atmosphere of the song was inspired by the Japanese anime "Lupin the Third's Theme". Lupin III is a long-running Japanese anime series (the early films were created by the team that later founded Studio Ghibli).

However, the theme tune changes from one series to the next, in line with the times.
There was a time when the original music was a type of music that was considered fusion or Jazz Funk, and there was a time when it became a 4-beat big band jazz type of music. I mix it with that version in mind. The vibraphone taking a solo part is an homage to that.

The song already exists in its finished form, it was just a matter of arranging it, so I didn't worry about it and enjoyed mixing it as a listener.



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