Urbanscapes
Notes On "Urbanscapes"
(From "Boyhood Skies" Series)
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 6 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 6 Professional
Number of tracks: 56
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Feb 20 2023 - Apr 17 2023
Concept: City of Tokyo around 1970 with neither Japanese nor 1970-like expressions
(TM writes:)
Listening to this track, you might wonder why the title is "Urbanscapes" despite the music itself. I contemplated it after mixing and mastering were done.
This is from the series of tributes (called "Boyhood Skies") to great musicians, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and this particular piece is one to both of the two men. Especially, Takahashi-san titled his works paradoxically like that sometimes, which is one reason for the title.
At the beginning my concept was to show our respect and love to those two musicians' collaborative works, including "Curtains", "Elastic Dummy", "Nice Age", "Waterford", "Silence Of Time", "Flashback", "School Of Thought", "Expecting Rivers", "Light In Darkness" and "Shadows On The Ground."
Nonetheless, this track originally was not as it is now at all, or completely different. I planned to realise the above concept and tried to make a piece I tentatively called "YT Groove 1 (YTG1)", but failed. That was simply an assembly of several irrelevant sections from my phrase stock. TI kindly said to me then, "it's going to be complete as one track somehow." Yes, that could have been, but the conceptual quality was far below my standard.
I started it over and struggled a lot. It was quite challenging, which was quite rare at the composition stage. At last, I used about a half of the sections in YTG1, including one or two re-arranged far out of our past track called "It's Sticking Around & Worked In" because that was a sort of our tribute to Takahashi-san as well. So, as a result of my re-re-arrangement or overall restructure, it has come extremely far. It's hard even for me to specify which section is from which of the original pieces.
I've come to the place where to come at last when adding another motive to the concept, which is to express some urbanscapes of the Tokyo city -- not now but around 1970, when those same-aged gentlemen were teenagers there. The city looks that way to me now, as I watched many videos of Tokyo's landscapes more than 50 years ago.
Those two artists were famous in part for their music exhibiting new images of Tokyo in the late 1970s. They were both born and raised there and so was I. That's why taking up the city before they became musicians has meanings to me.
The city more than 50 years ago looks surprisingly serene and dawdling to me now. Yet, for sure, people there at that time were likely to consider their lives there to be more sophisticated and busy. Such a paradox is very interesting.
Hearing that, you might think "it sounds neither very Japanese nor 1970-like." You make the point. The concept is to express a certain time and place without using the fixed images.
We, FMT, made a track called "King Of Tokyo", which is our image of the city completely different from what's been told publicly especially for propagandas just before the Olympic Games 2020. This track, this time, is about the city just after the previous Games in 1964.
At the late stage of the production I contemplated about how to deal with the drums, especially the snare drum that sounded delayed a little bit. It's even more so in the first sections. According to TI, its peak comes certain time after the exact beat, and it was hard for me to distinguish between upsetting delay or loose groove. Very iffy. Yet, I experimented to cut the snare drum on MuseScore first and then asked TI to cut it on Studio One. It seems that it ends up being effective at last.
"Fake acoustic instruments, but with as much solid dynamics"
(TI writes:)
For this piece, when I first received the MuseScore file from TM, he presented me with the reference music in the composition, but when I opened the file and checked the score and played it back, as he himself wrote,
>It's hard even for me to specify which section is from which of the original pieces.
I was amused because there was no glimpse of it at all.
Also, when I ported the data from MuseScore to Studio One and played it back, it was a strange sequence of choppy rhythm and minimum / incongruous phrases.
Indeed, when I listened closely to the choppy rhythm, I could hear the rhythmic elements in Yukihiro Takahashi's music as presented by TM, but as a tone, He was using "a type of drum sound with a slow attack and long reverberation" characteristic of drums played with Brush, so the rhythmic construction itself The rhythmic structure itself had common elements, but there were no common elements in terms of sound.
Therefore, I was very worried about how to put this together as a piece of music.
TM's description of his vision for the music (as he describes it in these notes) was difficult to understand, as it seemed to me like a cloud to be reached, but I understand in itself that he always composes with a clear concept in mind, so I started to mix the music with the only thing in mind: "not make extra touches, and to carefully and faithfully reproduce the MuseScore elements, but without any sonic inconsistencies."
This policies of "no extra touches" and "without any sonic inconsistencies" have been followed consistently throughout the mixing of this piece.
In terms of 'no unnecessary modifications', the bandwidth that interferes between parts and the bandwidth that is superfluous to express the tone (especially the low frequencies) were cut through all parts, and only a compressor to build a three-dimensional sound image and reverb to give spatiality to the sound were applied.
In terms of 'no acoustic inconsistencies', when a part contained a wide range of frequencies, we broke down the phrases or tones by frequencies and divided them into multiple tracks.
For example, if a phrase contains a wide range of pitches or bands (more than two octaves), even if no more than one note is sounding simultaneously in a single part, they are broken down into tracks for each band and processed accordingly, or if more than one note is sounding simultaneously, they are broken down into single notes and divided into their own tracks, appropriate processing for each band.
TMs in particular make heavy use of Sinewave, which has a very different musical role depending on the bandwidth. In particular, it plays a lead or obbligato role in the higher pitches, but in many cases it functions as a bass in the lower frequencies and is treated differently in the mix.
A lot of time was spent breaking these parts down (the way the song sounds when it is finished depends on the decisions made from this breakdown to the allocation of the parts).
After that, I worked on the overall atmosphere (sound image), and I matched our images of what he means by 'the atmosphere of 1970s Tokyo'.
I wasn't in Tokyo in the 1970s, so I can only imagine. However, I could somewhat imagine this part because I lived in a similar metropolis.
Also, in terms of acoustically constructing the 'atmosphere', there is no specific reference music, nor is it simply 'Lo-Fi'.
The concept of 'lo-fi' is a concept from the perspective of the past as seen from the present, expressing a 'stale' past. It is not the same as creating an 'atmosphere of the time'.
For example, whether it was in the 1970s or the 1980s, it was up-to-date at the time and never out of date. The film footage of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that we see today only looks old because we are comparing it with today's high-resolution images, but the resolution of the real scenery that the people in that footage saw should be the same as today.
In the midst of this situation, I suddenly remembered a video of a skit that Yukihiro Takahashi, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono had done together.
It was a very surrealistic video in which they "recall their very poor and painful childhood and talk about the hardships of that time while belittling each other, and all the memories of their childhood are fake*". The background music was minimal music created by Haruomi Hosono, played entirely on acoustic instruments that were probably sampled, and we felt that it was close to the atmosphere of this song.
*All three of them are from a sort of the establishment class in Tokyo, and only people who know that can be amused (some of them took this childhood episode seriously).
From there, we mixed in the direction of 'fake acoustic instruments, but with as much solid dynamics as possible, with a few electronic instruments intertwined in there, how made up it is'. Therefore, a unified room reverb was applied to the acoustic instruments, while the electronic instruments were treated flat without any effects and without any depth, to create a contrast with fake acoustic instruments.
As for the drum mix, TM is very nervous about the timing, so for the drum parts, I check the waveforms when the voices are imported into the Wav file and adjust the timing just right when they start to sound, and if I am particular about the way MuseScore sounds, I try to use Wav files that are output directly from MuseScore output Wav files as they are, but this time it was particularly difficult to make those adjustments. He points out that the rhythm is misaligned, but we had already taken the aforementioned measures and found that there was no problem with the pronunciation timing, the attack of the strike note was weak and the timing of the maximum volume peak shifted back a little from the notation,
>Yet, I experimented with cutting the snare drum on MuseScore first and then asked TI to cut it on Studio One.
The process is as follows.
I thought I had completed it, but at the end of last month, when I listened to the song again for this release, I found that something was missing.
Then I listened to the original MuseScore track again and realised that the saxophone and wind instruments sounded very good. I thought that perhaps this was the part that TM liked, so I replaced it with a WAV export of these parts directly from MuseScore. When I did this, the atmosphere was better, but the sound was still 'weak' and 'buried in the surrounding sound'. Also, in some places the volume was low and the phrases didn't sound clean. So I used a mix of tones from the same part of the previous take.
While repeating this process, I started to feel uncomfortable with the other parts, so I had to build the sound again from the beginning.
For the atmosphere of the mix at this time, I referred to the song 'The Arrangement' by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Therefore, the sound and atmosphere changed significantly in the process from the 'first completed' take to the 'second completed'.
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