Reply To: The Mandelbrot Set 3: Creepy Monkey Underpants
Caleb, I did drop out the guitar parts here and there and have them trade off, just to open up a little more space. I have not done this with the bass, but it is not a bad idea. Initially I didn’t bring the bass in at the start but let the theremin heartbeat bass line hold it for a while. If we add uke, I will probably drop out other tracks more to give it space. And thanks for your kind comments on my finger-picked guitar part — I just started working with a book on Travis picking last Sunday and I’m excited about learning it… I feel like it is one of JoCo’s secret weapons that I didn’t know about (basically, it lets you play parts that sound hard but really aren’t that hard, because the right hand is mostly just repeating simple patterns on autopilot).
I thought the chorus part with the FX came out pretty nicely. I could tweak the FX levels, filter depth, etc., the only problem being that there are, I dunno, 40 or 50 knobs on that plug-in to tweak… it could easily go into a full-blown “waste a whole evening” mod tweaking it.
Just a fun fact… there are, wow, I think _nineteen_ vocal tracks in this mix. I recorded the treble part 7 times, and the bass part 5 times, and then the chorus repeats 3 times for the treble part and 3 times for the bass part. There is one final sing through of the bridge that I use t feed into FX for the “creepy bridge noise.” By the time I got through all these my voice was really raw.
These groups are mixed down to five separate busses and then each run through its own FX chain. Even the “normal” vocals are going through a ring mod/filter and then into a reverb. All this technology helps to slightly cover up the fact that I can’t sing on key…
I know what you mean about contamination of your ears… when I have been mixing for a few hours I have to set it aside because I can no longer hear it fresh!