Underground
Notes on "UNDERGROUND"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 47
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Jul 19 2022 - 23 Jul 2022
Concept & Composition: The beauty of bass
(TM writes:)
The piece called "Underground" is, to me, a sort of a goal in the "minimal on basso continuo" series.
The most important part is the bass (ie, combination of the a low organ and a low sine wave). It feels like the bass is very expressionless and doesn't co-operate with the other parts at all, which I love very much.
While the combined basses form the whole groove, the percussion doesn't have to play anything like basic rhythmic patterns. The drums do that to some extent, of course, but at the same time they behave like solo instruments. That's one of the most distinctive features that minimal-on-basso-continuo has.
I can play drums, by the way, but have never done for FMT because I don't really love to play them, to be honest, but I love to listen to them. I don't like most of self-satisfactory drum solos, which I don't love to listen to. Yet, if a drum solo is played this way, I love it. That's what I thought during the design.
I designed, therefore, the drums like human play to some extent; it's ended up being a little bit like Vinnie Colaiuta, yet that was not my intention. Just eventually. I love his play, anyway.
From a different point of view, it's a little strange and funny to see why the drummer in this piece gets so excited to play his/her 5-4 sensation that shouldn't exist in the human body.
Furthermore, strictly speaking, it's NOT an ordinary 5-4 time. (I don't know what an "ordinary" 5-4 is like, though.) I mean, it's not 5 beats, but is actually treated as 10 beats, as you might hear. Viz., I divided the 5-4 into two 2.5-4s and designed the 2.5 beats like 5 beats. So, the 10-8 time is the most precise way of signifying the beat. If you don't understand what I mean just forget about it, because it's very technical. In that case, I would be happy if you could recognise it just as "something even more weird than the ordinary weird," whatever that might be.
Although the bass normally shows a direction in a way, or in other words, it makes it obvious how you should recognise the music, it doesn't in this track (as well as those in the series). That's why it seems like it "doesn't help the other parts at all."
I wrote the most of the lead phrases in some ways that arrangers would have thought those figured -- yes, the drums accompany them at a time or some -- but the bass keeps ignoring them to continue.
Onto the groove the bass and drums form some lead parts play, one of which is the extremely low tone.
Even though those who have never lived in an earthquake-prone land may not understand it, the sound is similar to the one you hear (or feel?) some seconds before an earthquake occurs. It seems ridiculous and paradoxical but somewhat attractive to me that a tone much lower than the bass is a lead part.
Beauty of bass. I wanted as much bass as possible. It often makes TI struggle with congested low frequencies, though. I even feel that the concept of minimal on basso continuo is nothing more than justification. Whether it being true or not, I'm quite happy with this album. I'm especially happy with this work, which has lots of lots of bass.
(TI writes:)
For this piece, TM created the entire MuseScore score and I added no new elements.
However, I arranged the English Horn part and the Violin part to fit the range and to be a single melody in multiple parts.
Sound production & Mixing
(TI writes:)
The sound is very simple. Apart from the rhythm part and the English Horn and Violin Pizzicato, each part in MuseScore was output individually and used as is. So I think the texture is similar to some of our releases such as 'Here I am'.
For this track, as TM wrote, the bass processing was the most important and hardest part.
However, looking back at the production record, the rest of the song didn't take much effort, or rather, the production period I was involved in was short, about three days (but I listened to it again before this release and reworked it again, including WAVing the rhythm sound, adjusting the localisation and readjusting the Gate for the bass parts).
The whole song has 47 tracks with 8 instrumental parts excluding drums and bass, which is not so many for an FMT song, but there are 9 bass parts, plus a bass drum, and TM's request that 2 of the bass parts should be split to left and right. The most difficult part of the project was to sort out how to divide the sounds gathered in these close bands into different parts.
In particular, these low frequency parts are only alternating between 60Hz and 120Hz, and the BD also sounds all the way around 100Hz, so the bands overlap each other. Of course, they don't overlap in the rhythm arrangement, but the reverberations overlap, and they swell up, making the rhythm less sharp and creating unnecessary volume peaks.
As unnecessary volume peaks increase, the overall bass volume level has to be lowered, which in turn reduces the sound pressure.
To prevent this, I put a Gate on each part and organised the reverberations. By organising and cutting the reverberations, the volume level can be increased by that amount. In addition to these, I also applied Sidechain-Compressor to the low-frequency Sinewave, triggered by the bass drum.
As for localisation, for the sound to keep the rhythm, the more you squeeze it, the more you can emphasise the rhythm. For this reason, the bass drum is made mono so that it sounds like a 'dot' whose localisation is narrowed down.
Not only this, but low frequencies can easily be heard spread out aurally even when localisation is narrowed down, so the mix tends to be uncluttered unless it is deliberately narrowed down. This is especially essential for a type of music with a large number of sounds, such as ours.
However, in this case, the number of notes is not so many, and at the request of the TM, the Sinewave was expanded left and right to emphasise the low frequencies. This kind of process of widening the low frequency range left and right usually results in the other sounds being compressed too much and either crushed or peaked out, so it doesn't work as well as I had imagined.
Also, in order to bring out the full low frequency range, I cut the instrumental part from 150Hz and below.
This allowed the bass drum to keep the rhythm in the centre, supported by the sound pressure of the Sinewave from the left and right, and gave the impression of a wall of low frequencies throughout the entire track.
For the bass drum, we emphasised the 5kHz attack bandwidth, which makes the rhythm even stronger.
If you feel that the bass drum is not sounding well, rather than simply increasing the volume of the bass drum, you can make the sound come through clearly by slightly emphasising this band (5kHz).
However, the attack component of any sound is in this area, so in this case it is important to coordinate with other sounds.
However, in this song, the Instrument is mainly wind instruments, and the only sound with a clear attack, other than the gong in the background, exists in the rhythm part, so emphasising the attack of the bass drum was a good idea to make the other rhythm parts more intertwined with the rhythm. I think it works very well, especially in combination with the finely chopped hi-hat and snare drum.
On the other hand, the Sinewave has a compressor to suppress the attack and a limiter to increase the sound pressure.
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