Somewhere I've never been - Saint-Germain-En-Laye (SuZanne Ledwith)

Notes On
Somewhere I've never been -
Saint-Germain-En-Laye
 (SuZanne Ledwith)






TRACK DATA

Composition tool: MuseScore3, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks:  43

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

Guest musicians: SuZanne Ledwith, STONERJAZZ, The Windscale Blues Experiment, Western Bocket

Composition and Recording period: Feb 6 2022 - Mar 29 2022






(TI writes:)

This version is based on the LIVE take Saint-Germain-En-Laye.

In the original LIVE take, SuZanne sings almost non-stop for about 10 minutes from the beginning to the end of the song, but the live arrangement made it difficult to get her singing to sound good enough, so we created this version to feature her singing.

The live guest players' performances are mostly unchanged, but our parts have been rewritten extensively, including the elimination of the rhythm part, and we have also replaced the tones and other elements.

Also, as noted above, we originally wanted to feature the greatness of her singing in high tones for almost 10 minutes in one take, but it was too long as a song, so we shortened it after discussing it with her. (We will introduce the uncut version when we have a chance.)

For our part, we cut the original phrases and stretched the notes out a bit, aiming to create the effect of an illusion of a slight shift in time signature. The piano and string phrases are a little slower and delayed, but the tempo itself is just right.

Little work was done on SuZanne's vocals beyond cutting out some noise, but a lot of time and effort was put into keeping the volume level constant.

In this case, I rewrote the volume data in detail and processed it so that the nuances remained the same, whereas in normal pop music, a compressor would have been applied.

However, her voice has so many overtones that it would be difficult to mix if it were played as it is, so in this version we cut off frequencies above 10 kHz (the uncut version was mixed without this high cut).



[Sound quality and overtones of SuZanne's voice]



This is a snapshot of an analysed vocal track by SuZanne, which is of course a single part. No effects or equalisation of any kind have been applied, and no reverberation was included in the original recording.

The yellow marks are the original pitches, but you can see that there are some peaks in the bandwidth above them. These peaks are called overtones. It is as if there are several harmonies in a single pitch.

It also fills up half of the bandwidth that can be measured (there is a smaller peak to the left of the centre, which probably picks up breath noise).

And you can see that the sound is perfect all the way to the far right (the highest value this analyser can measure / 20 kHz).

And the band to the right of the red line (above 10 kHz) is the part of the spectrum that the human ear can barely recognise as a musical tone (pitch) (and only a little further to the right, around 5 kHz, can it be recognised as a musical high note).

This part of the sound (above 10 kHz) is also potentially affected by the sound, but on analogue recording media it can be mixed with hissing noise and muddy the sound, and even on digital recording media, where hissing noise is theoretically not present, it is often cut when mixing. (Similarly, the ultra-low frequency section on the far left is also processed in this way.)

In fact, when I played it to SuZanne and TM during production, they both responded that the high-cut take was easier to listen to and sounded better.

However, as the mixer, I thought 'there are not many opportunities to hear this high tone (it is cut in commercially based music)' and 'whether you like it or not, I want to keep the sound close to the original sound', so I created the long version without cutting this bandwidth.

Also, SuZanne's vocal band mainly overlaps with the attack part of percussion instruments. Therefore, in order to make the most of her vocals, I thought it would be a good idea to reduce the number of rhythm instruments. Also, none of the songs she has released so far are rhythmless. Therefore, I tried to arrange this version without rhythm instruments. Also, like the attack part of the percussion instruments, it overlaps with the piano strike sound, but where the song is included, the peak part in the above image has been cut off so that the sounds do not overlap.

Conversely, the low frequencies do not interfere with her Vocal, no matter how high the volume is turned up. Therefore, a high-cut Dub bass (processed from the Bass played by Western Bokketo) was added.





Somewhere I've never been (Original Length & Voice)


TRACK DATA

Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks: 52,14(Master)

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

Composition and Recording period: Feb 17 2022 - May 11 2022




(TI writes:)

This is an uncut version of SuZanne and other guest players' performances on 'Somewhere I've never been' for SuZanne Ledwith. It is based on Saint-Germain-En-Laye from "Leaked Live FMT."

As mentioned earlier, this version is based on the idea of making use of her vocal as much as possible, with only noise editing, which is obviously superfluous, and with minimal equalisation, etc. The mix shows off her voice very well. Especially around the 3:22 minute mark, the voice is used exactly as it was recorded.

The Vocal sounds louder than the version SuZanne has released, but the volume balance is the same. If it sounds louder, it is because we have left out the treble bandwidth, which is cut in SuZanne's version.

Also, we didn't cut the guest players, but we cut our part significantly, changed the arrangement and timbre, and added a thin layer of environmental sounds recorded live at Saint-Germain-En-Laye in the background.

The ambient sounds start to gradually build up a rhythm in the middle (instead of sampling the ambient sounds to create a rhythm, we left them playing, passed them through the filter provided with Studio One, and programmed* the timing of the opening and closing of the filter).

*The method itself is primitive, but the beauty of a DAW is that ideas like this can be done as soon as they occur to you (connecting the individual functions of hardware effectors, synthesisers and samplers to a sequencer and controlling them requires a certain amount of electrical knowledge, hardware modification techniques and (which takes a lot of time and effort).

These sounds are thinly played percussion-like during the guest musician's solo performance, and revert to ambient sounds at the end of the piece.




Comments