Silence After You Leave
Notes On "SILENCE AFTER YOU LEAVE (LIVE Version)"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 6.5 Professional
Number of tracks: 28
Sound source: Recordings of live performances and sound effects, Sample One(Built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and recording period: Jul 3 2023 - Jun 2 2024 (Live Recording at Asakusa, Aug 8 2023 ,Dec 21 2023)
The genesis of live performance
(TI writes:)
As we have mentioned from time to time, we like 'live version', but we are not interested in 'live performances' in FMT and had no plans to do so.
That's why we went to the trouble of producing 'Leaked Live', a live version without live performances.
How did this come about?
It all started with a chat during a session with a teacher who used to teach piano to my children.
She and her students and I would have a session about once a month, and one of the things we discussed was, "Is there any FMT music that we can play live?"
However, FMT's music is characterised by compositions that are not intended to be played live at all.
The piano versions of 'In The Mirror' and 'Silence After You Leave' were thought to be playable.
After examining the score, I found that the former was impossible to play by hand (the way the notes move and harmony) and difficult to simplify in some places, while the latter seemed to be manageable depending on the arrangement.
However, the same song also has an uneven tempo and no rhythm part, so it was extremely difficult to actually match it live, so I arranged it in-tempo somehow, and that's the Version.
Arrangement
(TI continues:)
For the arrangement, I divided the part into three parts (so that it could be played by six hands, on a piano or electronic keyboard), based on the piano version of 'Silence After You Leave'.
With this, I tried to match them once, but it did not work at all.
The reason for this failure arose from problems with the structure and tempo.
The original piece was not at a constant tempo and the structure was so complex that it was more necessary for everyone to breathe together than to use individual techniques. However, it was necessary to keep the structure as simple as possible, as it was basically an on-the-spot session, not an environment where all the members could get together every day to practise.
So we rewrote it in a form where the tempo is constant and the beat changes, and the structure is simple and easy to understand.
However, even so, it is "a piece that changes beats from bar to bar, and the tonality is ambiguous", so it is expressed entirely in temporary signs without using key signatures, and the arrangement itself does not require much playing technique, but when playing it, in addition to having to follow the changes in beat with your eyes, the movements are not familiar to your body or fingers, so it is difficult to play.
In particular, the teacher, who had been trained to play classical piano pieces, seemed to have the most difficulty. She tried to play the music faithfully, thinking about the meaning of each notation, even when we wrote the notation for her convenience, so she seemed confused when I told her that there was no deep meaning in the notation and that it was simply written this way for visual clarity.
Part sharing and performance
(TI continues:)
We started with the teacher playing the piano part, me playing the synth part and another high school student playing the bass line and riff.
However, on the day of recording, the high school student was unable to participate, so I took over the refrain part, and for the bass line, the teacher asked me if I could rewrite the bass line as a cello part, since there was a student who could play cello. The original track also has a phrase with a sample cello tone, so I rewrote it with cello.
The finished take may sound like a very profound and splendid piece of music, but in the actual performance, we counted "1, 2, 3,,,," in our mouths as we played, and asked each other, "Is it out of tune? We are always talking to each other, saying things like, "Are we out of tune?" and "Probably not.
This is also one of the reasons why we did not record live from microphones except for the cellos.
Recording and mixing
(TI continues:)
As for the live recordings, some of the recordings were split into multiple sessions, as some of the recordings also included Cello, which was not planned at the beginning.
For the parts other than the cello, I recorded each part individually as MIDI, and then mixed the MIDI data into Studio One.
At that time, the timbre is changed and overt mis-touches are corrected.
No other information (timing, velocity, aftertouch, etc.) is altered in any way.
We have only included the original aftertouch information as it is, including the pitch swings (so the pitch swings are not artificial).
Also, when we played this live, we had a loud drum tone as a click (the rhythm being replaced by a clock sound in the piece).
This caused problems later on in the mix.
The keyboard parts were not miked, so there was no problem, but the drum tone was inevitably present in the cello performance.
Therefore, as much as possible, we cut it out with EQ etc. to make it less noticeable, but you can hear it where the cello is sounding (the cowbell sound is still there, completely. This is the sound picked up from the microphone).
Replacing tones
(TI continues:)
The drum tones in the rhythm part are easy to understand as clicks, but they are not familiar in the music.
As this is MIDI data, it can be replaced with any sound. However, it took a lot of trial and error to find and create a sound that would suit this song.
At first, I tried to create electronic sounds with a synth, but they sounded so "common" that they didn't really fit.
Then it occurred to me to try using the sound of a clock (second hand, time signal).
There are many songs that use the sound of a clock as a rhythmic motif, but it only plays the role of a sound effect, and I couldn't think of a song where the clock itself keeps ticking the rhythm all the time, so I thought I'd give it a try.
So I tried it out on various telephone time signals and it turned out to be very good.
As for the drum substitutions, BD and Tom are Japanese telephone time signals; HH and Roll Cymbal are Soviet aviation clocks; Crash Cymbal is a pillar clock from a hotel in Nagoya, Japan.
The piano part is not played on a piano, but on an electric keyboard, but it is a recording* of the piano sound that I always play at the place where I played it, which I lined up on a sampler and played.
I recorded five octaves of *C notes and lined them up. However, it took me about four minutes to finish playing five notes. Also, according to the studio, this piano (individual) is said to be vaguely tuned or easily out of tune, and this pitch uncertainty is reproduced.
"Reflection."
After performing live this time, I realised that when I create or perform music, I unconsciously put a break in the time axis with a bar or phrase, and that without a break it would be very difficult to perform. In other words, I have recognised once again how much I am stuck in the 'conventional western style' of music.
Essentially, as long as we exist at the same point on earth, time should flow at a constant tempo, not variable, and there should be no breaks.
In music, too, there is no break in In Tempo, for example in sutra and African music (but these are separated not by sound but by words and their meanings).
And yet, humans (or rather myself) try to find a break somewhere in time and rhythm, and its meaning.
This is true not only in music, but also in life. For example, social events such as New Year and Christmas, as well as personal events such as birthdays and wedding anniversaries.
Regarding these, I myself don't like the idea of 'this time last year', and I personally tried not to think about things like anniversary events (I don't deny celebrating and looking back socially, and I do celebrate family birthdays, etc.).
The point is that I tried to stay as far away as possible from "those artificial delimitations and common perceptions of styles and conventions", and to not get caught up in them, but physically it was very difficult.
It was a piece (arrangement) where I could really experience that.
The other thing is the high level of performance by the performers.
Both Emico on Piano and Soh on Cello played the complex score in almost one take, and with perfect timing, and I thought it would be easy to modify the Piano because it was recorded in midi, but the actual performance required very little modification. The actual performance was almost exactly on the Studio One grid.
And I thought that correcting the timing of the live cello would be very difficult, as the clicking drums were also playing with it, but there was no need for that.
It also reminded us that there is a great deal of information contained in the sounds we play with our physical bodies. The information we usually think of when composing and mixing music is basically tone, pitch, length, intensity and various types of modulation, but even just holding down a key with your fingers contains information about various instrumental controls.
It was very interesting to be able to visualise this as numerical values in the recorded MIDI data.
Video
(TI continues:)
When I shared the file on Google Drive to let them listen to the finished song, for some reason they couldn't listen to it, so I uploaded a video I had created at random on YouTube for them to listen to.
The teacher expressed interest in the (temporary) video and said, "This (temporary) video is great", and after listening to it, I thought, "Oh, creating a video is not so bad", so I combined free materials, videos and images I had on hand and created it to look like that.
And when I actually combined them, I found that they matched the sound very well, and they also matched the concept of the video in the first place, and I felt that the sound image and the images combined very perfectly.
At first, the image is cinematic and dark, interspersed with images of each member of the band, and before the ending, it suddenly becomes bright, and the image of the clouds and the first image of the clock are overlapped, and at the end, it becomes pure white and nothing.
The image of the original version was also the sky and clouds, so the images were unified.
Finally
(TI writes:)
In any case, Emico's "Can we play the FMT song live?"
Thanks for all your reckless ideas from the beginning to the end.
(TM added:)
This is my first experience to have a work I originally composed played by someone else, which is nothing but honourable. I, who know very well that playing it is so tricky and challenging, would really like to say thank you to TI and the performers.
Notes On "SILENCE AFTER YOU LEAVE"
Piano Version
(Released later in November 2023)
TRACK DATA
Original Version
(Released earlier in April 2023)
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 6 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 6 Professional
Number of tracks: 46
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Jun 24 2023 - Apr 6 2023
Concept: Epilogue of Boyhood Skies
(TM writes:)
When I planned this "Boyhood Skies" series in which we took up skies as the motif image, what first came to my mind is Joseph Mallord William Turner's works. As I wrote in the notes on our past work called "Symphony No. 1: The Great War," I love the British painter, Turner, whose work we used in the Symphony's key visual.
We didn't use any of his works eventually for the visual of this piece, but I use Alfred Sisley's work called "The Bridge at Moret at Sunset" (1892) for another track called "Looking Up At The Clouds." I heard Sisley had been influenced by Turner, as I refer to in its notes.
I wanted to create music like ambiguous skies Turner painted in this. This is my "rest in peace" and my image of Nirvana or a requiem.
It's nearly atonal, whereas it ambiguously follows the E major scale. It comprises mostly the combination of dyads and the time signature mainly keeps 12-8 with some tempo changes. So, this contains very FMT-esque features but tries to fully express my sentiment, which is also the case for the other works in the series. I just prioritised sentiment expression a lot more than musical experiments.
Throughout this whole track I intended to show some sort of lethargy after a loved person is lost, and to bring out a feeling like zero gravity especially in the intro.
I composed this work as the epilogue of the "Boyhood Skies" series as well as a tribute to two of our boyhood idol musicians, Yukihiro Takahashi, who died in January 2023, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was tackling with cancer. Just after I wrote this, Sakamoto-san passed away too in late March 2023.
We haven't experienced the "silence" caused by the absence of these musicians for almost our whole lives.
Rest in peace.
"To create an atmosphere that sounds somewhat distant and hazy"
(TI writes:)
For this piece, I worked incessantly on the sound creation and acoustic treatment.
TM asked me to 'blur the instrumentation as much as possible, except for the drums', and we did all kinds of processing to achieve this.
However, it was very difficult to 'blur' the sound but not 'break the phrases', as this is a contradiction in terms.
Therefore, basically, I do not process the original sound directly with effects, but add overtones to the effect (mainly reverb) processed by send and return, so that the sense of pitch is lost. This process is a more advanced version of our 'Particles Behaving Like Waves'.
I also run the reverberations through a synthesiser filter and make adjustments to the resonance oscillations, which sound like new overtones and phrases. However, as anyone who has used an analogue synthesiser will know, controlling the pitch of the overtone components by filter oscillation is extremely difficult, so it was a very difficult process. The pursuit of 'better' has to be taken in moderation when it comes to this process. When building a pitch by resonance oscillation, it is rare for the overtones to match your ideal overtone and pitch exactly, and the quality and pitch of the overtones varies from pitch to pitch, so I repeatedly hear things like "it sounds best at this pitch, but at another pitch it sounds completely undesirable". So, if you pursue it too much, I will end up moving further and further away from the ideal.
So I apply a filter to the white noise and oscillate the filter to create a sense of pitch, and I programme the filter and resonance values in single note increments so that the noise sounds at the pitch of the score.
However, this alone gives a 'strong typhoon-like sound', so a long reverb is applied, distortion is applied to the reverb sound, the sound is compressed by a compressor, and only the effect sound is output to create the atmosphere of a distant sound.
This process is now digitally controlled, so to some extent you can 'go back and redo', but in any case it is very difficult.
For this song, I really like the harmony that TM created, and it would be a shame to end the song as it is, so after the main part with the rhythm, I rearranged the harmonic part that TM created and stretched it out further as an outro.
I also cut out the original sound in that part and played only the effect component, trying to create an atmosphere that sounds somewhat distant and hazy.
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