Your song, sirs and/or madams:
Download 09_Re2Go_[030509].mp3
Download 09_Re2Go_RADIO_[030509].mp3
EMBED:
Remixers:
I will make the raw files for these tracks available to anyone on request. If demand gets high, I'll ask for a small donation to cover the time it takes for me to prep the sessions. All I ask is that you don't pull an out-and-out beat jacking on me (do something creative with it), and that you send me your track when you're done so I can post it on this site.
Album update:
I magically found 100 more halfway-done album sleeves with unscreened backs, so I finished those tonight (Wednesday). Now we have to take the back screen over to QRSTs (Boston people, go here and nowhere else for your t-shirt needs) to so they can wash it out and put the disc face design onto it. Then screen discs. Then done. I'm sorry this is taking so long. Stamping was nixed after a try at some good-looking but slow-drying promo discs:
Song details:
The loops and breaks for this song come from a 45 that my dad recorded with his high school band, The Flock, back when he was in high school. He was the drummer. With the help of Nick, my mastering engineer, who has a good setup for dumping vinyl to digital, I was able to provide you with mp3s of that record today (download link below imeem player). Technology!
Download The_Flock.zip
Note: I have no idea why Imeem won't name the tracks consistently. When I submitted the tracks, they were all named correctly. It's driving me insane. Can't fix it. Will punch someone.
As I understand it, back in those days, bands re-recorded contemporary songs and put out their demos in the hope that a label would pick them up and start paying for them to play songs that the label owned. Click here to link to the Wikipedia page for I Heard It Through the Grapevine to get a feel for how songs were bandied about back then.
Anyway, I think two of the tunes are from The Rascals, and the fourth - the one I sampled - is a cover of Sly and the Family Stone.
The Flock has at least one good story: according to my dad, they came in second to Joe Walsh (he of The Eagles, The James Gang, and numerous slurred-speech appearances on The Drew Carey Show) in a high school battle of the bands. Apparently, they day after they played, my dad got a call from the local musicians' union rep asking if they would join the union. So they had a band meeting.
!!!!Band meeting!!!!
They decided that if they joined the union they would be pricing themselves out of all of their regular local gigs, where they were making $500 a night,
STOP.
Let me note here that when I was out playing weekly soul-destroying bar gigs with The Indefinite Article, we were making $350-400 per night. Our best pull ever for a club show was around $1K, and we routinely put 150+ paying customers through the doors. So: WTF.
CONTINUE.
so they told the rep that they were happy where they were.
Next day Joe Walsh was declared the winner.
Of course, by this time Joe Walsh was already a living legend in Cleveland. I should add that there is no evidence that The Flock's refusal to join the union affected the decision; this is just the order in which I was told that things happened. It's fun to have theories, though.
Some production things:
The first, most important, and most difficult part of this song was to enhance the drum sounds so they pushed air like hip-hop drums should. The recording was a live-room recording, most likely mixed directly to tape. It was also squashed to bejesus, which made it difficult for me to dig the drum sounds out of the audio files.
Let me show you my dilemma.
Drums sounds are pretty easy to identify in Pro Tools. Here is a mono track with a kick drum underneath a stereo drum loop:
Easy enough. A full mix with easily identifiable drum transients looks like this (this is the opening to the master of Yeah (That's Right), my song from week 2):
The drums transients rise high above the rest of the mix. Easy enough to either pull the sounds out of the track and stack them until they sound huge, or - even better - to layer other drum samples under the track to fill out the low frequencies, lining up the attacks of the samples with the attacks of the drums in the two-track mix. It's even easier when you're sampling an artist who likes his or her drums high in the mix, like, for instance, me.
The Flock's version of You Can Make It If You Try looked like this:
You can see why this was difficult. Everything was so slammed that the drums had nowhere to go. Not that it was an inherently bad thing; it is definitely part of the character of the recording. For my purposes, however, it was a pain in the ass. So I guessed where the drums were hitting, and then I made sure that I guessed right by strong-arming the results.
I created new tracks and cut out chunks of the mix where I thought that the kick and snare were sounding and layered them below my samples. I compressed the crap out of those so they would pop and ended up with a little more air coming through the speakers, but not enough. Then I made copy of the chopped-drums track and started replacing those files with drum samples that I recorded into ProTools from my Ensoniq ASR-X. (note to recording people: I didn't use Sound Replacer because I don't have it). I did it manually, but it was as easy as highlighting the slivers of sound that I had already created and pressing CTRL+V with a sample of the ASR-X drums from my clipboard.
You'll hear the ASR-X drums kick in halfway through the first verse, during the Lee Iacocca line.
One note on that line: I tried as hard as I could on this song to stay away from bad language, since I figure that my dad will be pretty eager to email this to his friends and whatnot, but the Lee Iacocca line was just too good to ignore. I have disgraced the family.
Also I would like to point out that in the second verse I rap about my cat and name drop my crossword puzzologist friend Brendan Quigley in rapid succession. Find me a rapper who does that.
Seriously. I'm nine weeks in and there is nothing to rap about anymore.
UPDATE: I forgot to credit writer Thomas Bechtold for bringing my attention to the phrase "only users lose drugs." And now I have forgotten no longer.
Links:
Read this article all the way through (h/t to Abra). Sit down when you read the last sentence.
Breathe.
What an arrogant asshole.
I understand that corporate money can do a whole lot of good for universities with strong research departments, but if your professors are picking up six figures a year advising for pharmaceutical companies, they had all better be taking long looks in the mirror before they make claims that their superior intellect renders those ties moot.
(Full disclosure: I did my undergrad at Harvard. I am embarrassed by the above.)
Note: I have no idea why Imeem won't name the tracks consistently. When I submitted the tracks, they were all named correctly. It's driving me insane. Can't fix it. Will punch someone.
As I understand it, back in those days, bands re-recorded contemporary songs and put out their demos in the hope that a label would pick them up and start paying for them to play songs that the label owned. Click here to link to the Wikipedia page for I Heard It Through the Grapevine to get a feel for how songs were bandied about back then.
Anyway, I think two of the tunes are from The Rascals, and the fourth - the one I sampled - is a cover of Sly and the Family Stone.
The Flock has at least one good story: according to my dad, they came in second to Joe Walsh (he of The Eagles, The James Gang, and numerous slurred-speech appearances on The Drew Carey Show) in a high school battle of the bands. Apparently, they day after they played, my dad got a call from the local musicians' union rep asking if they would join the union. So they had a band meeting.
!!!!Band meeting!!!!
They decided that if they joined the union they would be pricing themselves out of all of their regular local gigs, where they were making $500 a night,
STOP.
Let me note here that when I was out playing weekly soul-destroying bar gigs with The Indefinite Article, we were making $350-400 per night. Our best pull ever for a club show was around $1K, and we routinely put 150+ paying customers through the doors. So: WTF.
CONTINUE.
so they told the rep that they were happy where they were.
Next day Joe Walsh was declared the winner.
Of course, by this time Joe Walsh was already a living legend in Cleveland. I should add that there is no evidence that The Flock's refusal to join the union affected the decision; this is just the order in which I was told that things happened. It's fun to have theories, though.
Some production things:
The first, most important, and most difficult part of this song was to enhance the drum sounds so they pushed air like hip-hop drums should. The recording was a live-room recording, most likely mixed directly to tape. It was also squashed to bejesus, which made it difficult for me to dig the drum sounds out of the audio files.
Let me show you my dilemma.
Drums sounds are pretty easy to identify in Pro Tools. Here is a mono track with a kick drum underneath a stereo drum loop:
Easy enough. A full mix with easily identifiable drum transients looks like this (this is the opening to the master of Yeah (That's Right), my song from week 2):
The drums transients rise high above the rest of the mix. Easy enough to either pull the sounds out of the track and stack them until they sound huge, or - even better - to layer other drum samples under the track to fill out the low frequencies, lining up the attacks of the samples with the attacks of the drums in the two-track mix. It's even easier when you're sampling an artist who likes his or her drums high in the mix, like, for instance, me.
The Flock's version of You Can Make It If You Try looked like this:
You can see why this was difficult. Everything was so slammed that the drums had nowhere to go. Not that it was an inherently bad thing; it is definitely part of the character of the recording. For my purposes, however, it was a pain in the ass. So I guessed where the drums were hitting, and then I made sure that I guessed right by strong-arming the results.
I created new tracks and cut out chunks of the mix where I thought that the kick and snare were sounding and layered them below my samples. I compressed the crap out of those so they would pop and ended up with a little more air coming through the speakers, but not enough. Then I made copy of the chopped-drums track and started replacing those files with drum samples that I recorded into ProTools from my Ensoniq ASR-X. (note to recording people: I didn't use Sound Replacer because I don't have it). I did it manually, but it was as easy as highlighting the slivers of sound that I had already created and pressing CTRL+V with a sample of the ASR-X drums from my clipboard.
You'll hear the ASR-X drums kick in halfway through the first verse, during the Lee Iacocca line.
One note on that line: I tried as hard as I could on this song to stay away from bad language, since I figure that my dad will be pretty eager to email this to his friends and whatnot, but the Lee Iacocca line was just too good to ignore. I have disgraced the family.
Also I would like to point out that in the second verse I rap about my cat and name drop my crossword puzzologist friend Brendan Quigley in rapid succession. Find me a rapper who does that.
Seriously. I'm nine weeks in and there is nothing to rap about anymore.
UPDATE: I forgot to credit writer Thomas Bechtold for bringing my attention to the phrase "only users lose drugs." And now I have forgotten no longer.
Links:
Read this article all the way through (h/t to Abra). Sit down when you read the last sentence.
Breathe.
What an arrogant asshole.
I understand that corporate money can do a whole lot of good for universities with strong research departments, but if your professors are picking up six figures a year advising for pharmaceutical companies, they had all better be taking long looks in the mirror before they make claims that their superior intellect renders those ties moot.
(Full disclosure: I did my undergrad at Harvard. I am embarrassed by the above.)
This Is Why You're Fat. Indeed.
Song credits:
Samples taken from "You Can Make It If You Try," by The Flock. Mixed by Phil Gorey. Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East, Cambridge MA.
Samples taken from "You Can Make It If You Try," by The Flock. Mixed by Phil Gorey. Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East, Cambridge MA.
Posts
3 Comments:
This song is just plain fun. Excellent work, FA, and thanks for the link. Now I have to make my site prettier so people will stay...
$500 in 1968 dollars is $3000 in today's. Humbling, huh? (Thanks for the shout out)
nice track Abe!
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