North At Defining Moments
The Notes on North At Defining Moments
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 80
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Apr 27 2022 - Jun 18 2022
Concept: Minimal on the bass
(TM writes:)
I wrote in the notes on "Equatorial Deliverance",
In terms of the rhythm, as you may have recognised, the role of the drum kit is far different from the traditional one. Even though traditionally the drums are supposed to show the initial beats and strong beats, I hardly did so here. My tendency like that is going to be strengthened in the tracks to be released later (which we are working on recently at the time I am writing this text). I may be talking about that more in the later notes.
So, this is one of the "later notes." Such a role change in the drums is further remarkable in this track, I think. I love this groove so much.
What makes that groove is not only the drum kit, but the bass and the claps play also important roles. The kick drums are obviously very far from, for instance, four-on-the-floor, and are merely what present the unusual strong beats. It's like "stress" in the English language. Usually, kick drums are hit to show the basic beats in principle. It's not the case in reggae, for example, and the way the kick drums sound here is more like reggae in a sense.
The bass has, quite uniquely, many notes and dyads. I would call it "a very low sequencer phrase", rather than the bass. It does not aim to show the key notes, which accelerate erratic (or beautiful in a sense) atonality. Especially when the somewhat Ukrainian melody appears in the minor scale, it sounds unexpected and consistent thanks to the low phrase.
I don't remember I have heard such minimal music with minimal phrase on the bass yet. (Although TI taught me about existing music near to this later, I thought that was fine but I wanted "a little more.") This is an experiment like that. Through the process of production, we were so astonished at the newness that we decided to do another series ("Auditory Art For Visual Arts"). I feel like moving this track to the next series but then one of the five directions would be missing. So I haven't moved.
Composition: Unusual combination of adrift East European motif and intense groove
(TM writes:)
Also, I've never heard such composition of the rhythm before. We don't use any instrument of bass but designed the base of bass with the sine wave instead. Then, I put the organ bass along a particular scale as well as combined them with the marimba. Although the scale is remained ambiguous, it's basically like E-F-Gb-A-B-C-C#-D, which is unlikely to have its name, but is altered within this track.
No matter where, folk music tends to apply low-tone drums, which the sine wave is made play the role of. Interestingly to me, the kick drum is used to decorate the rhythm rather than the base of it, when appearing later, just as I wrote in the quotation above.
An even more interesting thing is that the rhythm appears quite new in the sense that it contains complex accents and syncopations on a primitive beat mainly with the bass parts and generates an unheard groove.
What makes it even more complex is the rim shots and claps, which are rarely used this way in general. The rim shots were replaced by the electronic noise TI made, which I like so much. But it has in fact a complex "intonations", rather than zero groove like very ordinary electronic music. That's the case for the claps as well; they are hardly utilised that way.
In the middle of this work a East-European motif emerges. That is one I created like ancient Ukrainian music. It doesn't have the notion of "bars" like other folk music in many areas. But minimal music is composed of some repeated phrase, which implies nothing but the notion of bars, and thus that causes a mismatch. That was my aim, so that the Ukrainian motif was designed as being adrift.
This motif is also syncopated, which I've never heard in East European music before. Similarly I don't remember their folk music is associated with such an intense groove. That those combinations are intriguing is my finding this time, and this track is what made and developed such a combination.
In contrast to the key in E on the scale (in the whole track), I composed the motif in something nearly like C-sharp minor. C-sharp minor includes D-sharp and G-sharp, while the E scale doesn't. I made this in order to make it adrift because an East European motif tends to be low-tone and that would have been buried by the minimal bass parts.
Why have we featured the Ukrainian music? Well, in this track I don't mean anything related to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, even though I'm always against any war.
(TI writes:)
For this track, TM wrote the entire MuseScore and I did not add any notes in the MuseScore, and I took each part apart and re-arranged it.
One of the characteristics of TM's MuseScore compositions is that a wide range of pitches and more than one note can be written in a single part (one level of the score) at the same time.
If this were to be played in Studio One as is, the wide range of notes would make it impossible for the sound region of the tone to cope, and the wide range and large number of notes would make it difficult to mix (equalise and adjust localisation) in a single channel, so each part is broken down, the range of notes organised, and in some cases the phrase is slightly rewritten or rearranged.
As a result, a part may become four or five individual parts. This is one of the reasons why our tracks have more tracks.
In this process of decomposition and then reconstruction, I can see and hear many things. I discover beautiful harmonies and phrases in the phrases he wrote and think about how to express them in the sound production and mix. This is a very enjoyable process.
This would be different if I wrote them as separate parts in MuseScore from the beginning, or if I had too many parts to begin with and they would be out of MuseScore's screen.
In fact, when I add sounds and phrases to MuseScore, I create another file to work in because I can't fit them in.
(TM: yes, he's made the point as well as there would become many parts missing in the notation video, then. I appreciate TI for breaking down each time.)
Sound production and mixing
(TI writes:)
I mixed the track with a more gothic ('gothic' in the original sense of the word), kind of rough, atmosphere in mind, in line with the concept of TM.
For this track, the mix is mainly based on classical instrumental sounds. At first I thought about creating an acid or minimal techno style with the synth bass playing throughout the track, but such music already exists, and I aimed for a form that mixes classical instruments and electronic sounds.
I also paid attention to the compressor settings in order to make each part sound more vivid. We were particularly conscious of creating sounds that focused on the marimba, pizzicato, piano, bass drum and handclaps.
Specifically, I adjusted the attack and release times of the compressors for these sounds. In order to make the attack sound strong, the attack part of each instrument should be set to a setting where no compression is applied (longer compressor attack time) and the release time should be adjusted to match the tempo (do not make the release time too long).
The threshold time was also set to the average value or slightly lower than the average value after carefully checking the average volume of the part (especially for the piano, pizzicato and bass drum in this track, which have a strong attack, if the compression is set to the peak, the effect of the compression will be difficult to produce. (especially for the piano, pizzicato, bass drums and other strong-attack tones in this track).
Perhaps it was through the mixing of this track that I was able to gain a deeper understanding of how to use the compressor.
However, apart from basic equalisation and compression, the only other effectors used this time were reverb and delay. Various types of reverb were used and delays were set individually for each part, and the amount of delay applied varied from place to place.
Visual
The visual we use for this track on SoundCloud is from an aerial photograph of The Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia. (TM: It's Latvian, not Ukrainian, just to dilute particular geographic features.)
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