Sealed Off - In The Pneuma
Notes On "Sealed Off - In The Pneuma"
(Originally by Tengo's Trail a.k.a. Echo Garage)ON Soundcloud
On YouTube (Notation Video)
Track Data
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 4 ProfessionalRecording tool (DAW): Studio One 4 Professional
Number of tracks: 67 (including 6 original tracks from Echo Garage), 28(Gary Rees' additional part.)
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NoiseMaker
Composition and recording period: 15 April 2020 - 5 May 2020
[Inspiration to Write Music]
(TI writes:) The inspiration for the track was Echo Garage sending me a multi-track of the original track titled Sealed Off.
We've always loved his music and have collaborated with him in the past, so I immediately responded to his suggestion, "Why don't you create something with this?”
In fact, the noisy guitar sound in this track is exactly what I would like to use for the soundtrack to the video "M To W: The Realm Of Mother Nature" (released later than this track).
There is no sound of him in this track. But there's a poetry reading by Gary Rees and a guitar in there.
(TM writes:) When I first listened to Echo Garage’s “Sealed Off” I liked it. I recalled Massive Attack, which I love very much, though I didn’t think it was like their music. This work reflects my great respect to the so-called Abstract Hiphop from Bristol including them.
[About the Production of Our Part]
(TI writes:) The first thing I thought when I heard the Echo Garage multitrack was, "This track could be made into any type of track.”
But "any type of track" means "what's the best thing to do for this track?” I was troubled by the fact that it was difficult to decide what to do.
The first thing I did was to try and put together with a motif titled ”Driving In The Foggy Highland" that TM had been trying to create.
By the way, "Driving~" is a completely different type of motif from "Sealed Off."
It fell into place unexpectedly well, but TM reworked it even further and made it a completely different type of track than what I'd created. Thus, we will be working on this track sometime.
(TM writes:) The tentative title of this track was “EG”, which stood for Echo Garage. EG, which was the combination between EG and Driving~ at the time was attractive enough but it sounded like “Sealed Off with a little more elements added” to me. I further developed several sets of original phrases (as on the notation above) from Sealed Off. That was a break-through.
Those phrases contain many 32nd and some 64th notes as on the high tone part like a Rhodes piano, a type of synth bass I’ve never heard, and drums, which sound mechanical but at the same time a little human. We thereby tried to make groove that we haven’t heard before.
After that I restructured it completely, where it uses samples from the original Sealed Off from the intermediate to the end. Also, I added three types of noise recorded on a boat on a sea, which include wind noise and engine noise. It’s a Asian fishing boat, though its aim is to add some image of Bristol.
(TI:) This is the foundation of this track.
This time it was almost complete as a track at this stage. I hardly added a phrase to this track, so to speak.
[About the Mix]
(TI:) This time, compared to our regular tracks, there were fewer sounds, and since Echo Garage’s sound was already in, mixing wasn't technically that difficult.
However, it is a one-chord track, and if the number of notes is low, it tends to become a track with few undulations. Some parts have strong reverb, others are dry, and so on.
Also, this track has a distinctive bass section, which made it very difficult to adjust the localization. We spent a lot of time splitting the bass drum and two bass lines (which Echo Garage and we created) in particular.
In terms of processing, we placed the laid-back EG parts wider and lower in localization, whereas the bass parts of our fast passages were placed narrower and higher in the band, and the finely rhythmic bass drums were put in mono and centered.
The mixing procedure is a two-step process, first completing a 2-Mix consisting of Echo Garage and our parts, then combining the master track of that 2-Mix with Gary's additional parts.
I got Gary's part (as explained below) with an unspecified tone (piano tone) MIDI data. It was cut and mixed into 26 tones without changing or cutting any of the notes.
[About Gary Rees' Parts]
(TI:) We completed this track on our own at one point. However, although we liked our own version very much, we thought it was "missing something," an element that we don't have. I called out, thinking that it would probably require Gary's phrasing.
And when I listened to the MIDI data I received, I was convinced that the track had been given a new color. Specifically, effective phrases were contained just where the registers did not overlap, for example, the arpeggio where Echo Garage's noise guitar comes in.
Therefore, I concentrated on finding the most appropriate color (= tone) for the phrase. Then TM suggested, "Gary's phrases would go well with a guitar with a chorus. Certainly the first phrase was a perfect fit with the chorused guitar. It was also a nice contrast to Echo Garage's noise guitar coming in.
For the next phrase, there was a beautiful harmony in the middle and upper register, so I used the human voice, which is not used in this track. Then, the left hand part had just the right low frequency range, so I put the sidechain compressor on the sine wave, and the left hand part had just the right low frequency range. At the end, I arranged the piano and the synth lead with a bit of white noise.
This time, I didn't use any presets for the synth sounds.
[Other]
(TI:) Soundcloud's visual imagery is an homage to EP-4’s masterpiece album, an avant-garde funk band from Kyoto, Japan.
The slide in the park near my house, where I jog with my son, where so many kids are always playing, was "sealed off" (May 9, 2020).
(TM:) I entitled the subtitle as "in the pneuma". Echo Garage’s original track uses many long tones like all in-between space are literally sealed off with them in order for anyone to intrude. But this version we've arranged has a lot of space with the high 32nd notes, symbolically. So I thought, the original version sounds like somewhere physically sealed off and this one like some part in the mind is sealed off. Then I looked up into a thesaurus for some more suitable synonym. Then I reached pneuma at last.