Really enjoying JP's side one. Some nice Moroder-esque key patterns! With the lyrics it's making me think of Cat People.
Thanks. The working title is 'Project Retake' (though I seriously considered 'Return to Zero'), and it's a reworking of some songs from my first few albums, now that I have better technology to hand and more experience.
Side 1:
"Quest for the Sacred Jaguar" - From the first album, this was my first attempt at making an extended progressive rock track and it's still one of my favourites, especially the ending.
"Return to Babel" - I think this was the first actual song I wrote since starting the studio. I really wanted to freeze the vocals but I never had the systems to do it properly. Earlier this year I bought an Electroharmonix Freeze pedal, but I had the problem that it still played the original signal through. I made numerous modifications to it which were supposed to give only the wet signal, but nothing worked. In the end I used brute force. I played the vocals through the pedal and recorded them onto the A807, first dry and then with the appropriate word frozen and the multitrack stopped afterwards. Then I took a razorblade and welded the two together, which accounts for the slight jump each time it happens. It was then copied back onto the multitrack using trial and error to synchronize them.
The middle one with the reverse-reverb was done by flipping the tape over, as I did in the 2003 recording. IIRC it's the only one which doesn't use the Freeze pedal.
The babbling sound at the start and the end were flown in from the 2003 recording of the song - they were originally made from a WAV file I recorded of me saying 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. I had wanted to chop it up on tape and re-edit it but I didn't have the splicing block and tape yet, so I did it all in Goldwave, and a sample randomizing program called 'Mad Splatter' which my brother had persuaded me to write when he was into digital hardcore and other such things. I then transferred it to a UHER 4000, and copied it onto the TSR-8 through some kind of stereo delay patch I had made on the Zoom RFX-2000. During the transfer I poked the reels and generally manhandled the poor UHER to give it those lovely tape manipulation sounds. This version is extended over the original in that I added an intro. This was actually inspired by my rediscovering an early test recording before I decided to put the babble at the end, so there was a test where it was added at the start. I made up my mind that if I ever did it live I would cue that intro first. That still hasn't happened, but this is the next best thing.
"The Young Human" came next, I think. That was one of the weirder songs from the second album. I think it was inspired by a joke song my friends came up with when we tried and failed miserably to start a band during our early teens. The sound effects were flown in from the 2004 version, and also some of the tape delay feedback. This caused problems when I realised to my horror that the MIDI file - and thus the new 24-track recording - was was in a different key to the original 8-track recording. I managed to coerce it into working by means of the varispeed control. I spent a lot of effort trying to do actual tape flanging on the chorus but was thwarted by many factors including the drive belt going on the old Tascam 32. I got there in the end, though.
"Borderline" - I can't now remember why I wrote this song. The lyrics make me cringe a bit, but I do like the Hamlet opening. I remember that engineering the original 8-track version was a total nightmare. The electric piano then was done using the Lounge Lizard softsynth, and Cakewalk Sonar. It worked perfectly unless you actually did the final recording onto tape - at that point it went crazy and began outputting the audio at 48KHz instead of 44 or somesuch, which threw the piano way off pitch. I remember being forced to fix it by recording at the wrong speed using the varispeed control to make it match. Then there was recording the harmony. On the 8-track that meant recording them, bouncing them down to a single track and erasing the original. Engineering the intro was fun too - the opening synthesizer had to be done backwards so I had to flip the tape and hold down that one note and release it according to the beep cues which I had laid down as a guide. They remained on the tape and so had to be muted initially during mixdown. I should also mention that the very first version used a sample from a film version of Hamlet before I recorded my own, so when I flipped the tape over, I forgot the track order had changed, muted the wrong one and suddenly had this satanic voice speaking backwards into my ear.
The rerecording avoided most of these problems. Rather than redo the intro I flew in the synth and voice track from the original tape, but I think that was the only thing taken from the original version.
Side 2
"Crystaltopia" - from the third album. I was torn between this and 'Zoocity', but ZooCity was a song I had already done two takes of back in the day and it only ever came out worse. The third album was the point at which the vocals were reasonably good so I began flying them in from the multitrack rather than rerecording them. On Crystaltopia I also copied in the organ. Everything else was redone, though and I added an extra minimoog part to fade out with at the end. There was a bit of a crisis when I discovered that the timing was off between the 8-track and 24-track recordings, but I managed to fix it by adding an offset in the synchronizer during the copy.
"Vampires In Reverse" - I think this was all rerecorded from scratch. No real complications that I can remember.
"Shadow over Merthyr" - from the fourth album. It was this song which actually gave me the idea to rerecord the old songs. The vocals are flown in from the original 8-track recording. By making two copies and a lot of delicate erasing at half-speed, I managed to split the narration and the weird death-metal chorus into two separate tracks instead of just one. Everything else is new. In the 2006/7 version I had a sort of fake guitar thing made by abusing Lounge Lizard. It sounded tacky and my attempts to add distorted guitar by abusing my bass sounded even worse so I redid the fake guitar - and then decided to mute it during mixdown. The song is a poke at a metal band called 'Bal Sagoth' who I was rather fond of for their keyboard orchestrations and fantastical lyrics. They used the Roland orchestral patches from the XP30, and I use the same expansion card on my JV1010.
"What did Daniel Think He Was?" - this was the closing track on the fourth album. In this version I flew in the vocals and samples from the 8-track version and redid everything else. I put the drums through a 15ips tape delay and used odd panning arrangements to try and evoke a 1970 sound to the song. There is some clipping on the samples - some of which was on the original, some of which was accidental and some of which was deliberate to make it sound like it had been lifted from a worn film or something. In reality it was assembled in Audacity around 2006 using voices contributed for a 'radio series' I was making about the web comic this song was inspired by. When I later recorded that episode for the radio project, I used an instrumental version of the song as the score.
"Black Mass in B-minor" - this was written as scoring for that same radio project thing. The original test WAV file was used as the hidden track at the end of the fourth album, but in my haste I somehow messed things up and it ended up playing back at the wrong sample rate on the CD. This version was remixed from the original source files dumped to tape, a stereo pair for the score and the voices in the middle. It was actually an experiment in voice processing which I rather liked - I did the original recording myself and then dumped it into the Revox B77, gradually slowing it down to morph the characters voice from normal to 'Angry God', in the mould of Zardoz.
"ZooCity" - this was an extra from the third album which I decided to remix as a bonus. It's mixed from the original 8-track with no transfers or fixes. It was this song which persuaded me to stop using my Autotune outboard unit as of the third album (this song was done during the sessions for the second album but wouldn't fit). I still think that the overuse of autotune gives it an interesting character on the harmonies and subsequent attempts to redo it without any autotune met with failure.
"One Less Hero" - from the second album. Another bonus remix. I had no intention of remixing this originally, but I accidentally stopped in the middle of it while trying to find the start of Zoocity on the multitrack and decided I'd do it if there was enough tape left at the end. In retrospect I should probably have done a more complete remake since the 'total disaster' line is jarringly out of time. The most difficult part of this song was the spoon solo which I redid about three dozen times until I was able to get it right. I'm still not sure whether to include it on the CD or not but I do think it is kind of cute.
