NAIVES: Horizon (Ali Jamieson Remix)

Bass

With the chords written I could move onto writing the bass part which is really what carries most of the pace of this track. The bass was made up of four carefully processed layers, a sub form LennarDigital’s Sylenth1, a Korg PolySix and Korg Wavestation SR. The fourth layer was a Teisco 60f with some echo, used only in breakdowns or build ups:

Sub

PolySix

Wavestation

Teisco

All of the basses were bussed into a summing track (by shift-selecting the four tracks and hitting shift + cmd + d), with some Waves Channel Strip, Logic EQ and two compressors, one to gel the sounds together and the second to act as a sidechain compressor using the kick as a trigger.

Here’s the programming for the verse groove. As you can see it’s quite frenetic, quickly switching between octaves and using lots of short notes and rests, a technique I’ve found good to get scatty bass lines. Importantly this (and virtually none of the rest of the MIDI) has any swing applied to it at all – it’s dead straight:

The four parts together with the drums sound like this:

Sound Design

With the drums, piano, bass and vocals in place the next logical steps were to pad the track out with some synths and various other sounds.

I added an Arturia Jupiter-8V playing a simple F-7 chord, using a tweaked version of the JMB_Full Pad patch:

I added a whole bunch of other Arturia synths too (love those guys!): the CS80V, an ARP2600 V2, Matrix 12V, Prophet V2 and [Moog] Mini V.

Each was EQd (mostly shaving off some bottom end) and a phaser was applied to the 2600 for some movement. There’s some reverb and delay on a send and the Prophet and Moog were panned left and right respectively:

This in isolation sounds like something that could be off 76:14 (blowing my own trumpet a bit here), which I thought was a nice juxtaposition to the brittle funk of the bass and drums.

One of the sections I was really happy with was the post-chorus “only Horizon…” bit – a reprisal of the verse chords with the piano and an added synth line. This is an ES2 patch I made ages ago (and have been using since Bitrman):

Quite simple: two sawtooths an octave apart with a square wave running into a low-pass filter with some chorus, analog and unison detune. The filter is opened by envelope two and the attack of envelope two is modulated by the velocity.

I added some SSL Channel Strip, TAL Dub II, Camel Audio Camel Phat (doing the Phonat trick of using a 1/4 beat ramp up LFO to control volume giving you a pseudo pumping effect), and some Logic EQ:

However it wasn’t quite cutting through the mix so I added a Harpsichord (that and I’ve always wanted to use one in a jazz context since hearing Herbaliser’s Something Wicked This Way Comes):

The two combined sounded like this:

The harpsichord turned out to be quite handy at doubling up with synthetic sounds; there was another poly synth part I introduced in verse two coming from EXS24’s XP Synhorn Stereo (almost certainly some sort of Roland workstation sound) that the harpsichord complemented nicely.

The sound had some SSL Channel Strip, Voxengo’s (free) OldSkoolVerb, CamelPhat doing the same trick as the previous sound and Logic Sample Delay. Again, here’s the sound on it’s own, then with the Harpsichord added:

Before

After

Various other sounds came from Sylenth1’s BigSynth to lift the choruses, my Roland RS-202 during the breakdown and the plinky-plonky leads were a Korg MonoPoly and Roland D50.

Guitar

The track was popping along nicely but was lacking a bit of bite, something that only really recorded guitar can offer. I’m not the most competent guitarist in the world but can play a few chords; however this genre needs a really clean, funky Nile Rodgers style which I am not great at.

I’d recently had a music tech student who was a great guitarist, Jadhiel Asaph from São Paulo, Brazil. I sent over the chord changes and a few YouTube links and within a few days I had lots of options available to me.

He played a Fender Strat American Standard with Texas special pickups into a Black Lion Audio Auteur Preamp.

He’d played through the whole track a few times, allowing me to select certain sections for impact. I had guitar in the bridge, chorus, post-chorus, breakdown, and outro. To get this sound I importantly didn’t use any amp simulation, just SSL Channel Strip, Logic EQ and Waves CLA-2A.

I found I could get away with adding quite liberal amounts of high-end to the EQ: a high-shelf of 10dB at 12k Hz. Normally I would shy away from this brash EQing, but in the mix it sounded perfect.

I’m particularly pleased with how the post-chorus section came out, where the guitar really lifted it to new places. Here it is with just the drums, basses, ES2 and Harpsichord parts:

I added some of my own guitar during the breakdown that was more atmospheric and semi-improvised with plenty of effects. This helped the breakdown sound a bit less static. I played through a Boss CS-3 Compressor/Sustainer, Mutron Phasor, Line 6 FM-4 and Way Huge Aqua-Puss. Afterwards I just added some of Logic’s Stereo Delay to widen the sound a bit:

Vocals

The vocals delivered to me sounded fine in the original track but to get them sitting I had to process them a little bit. Obviously the first thing was moving them from 127 bpm to 117 bpm, which I did in Ableton Live (despite Logic’s time stretching improving vastly it’s still a bit cumbersome compared to Live).

I also had them tuned a tad by someone else who had Celemony’s Melodyne (thank you Blende) – they were tuned okay but a the performance was a little shrill and just needed tidying up.

Once in Logic they had some (yup, you’ve guessed it!) SSL Channel Strip, utilising the parametric EQ, compression and gating (to remove some unwanted headphone spill).

I added Eventide’s (free) UltraChannel for the Micro Pitch Shift effect, too. Then there was some Waves CLA-2A, CLA Vocals and Logic’s Compressor. There’s another copy of the vocals doing the “only Horizon” bit, with TAL’s Dub II and Tone2’s Bi Filter.

The vocoder in this track is subtle but helps carry a few sections. Here’s what’s going on in the breakdown just before the chords change:

We have three vocoders going on here and two are Logic’s EVOC PS (in red): Vocoder Low is a monophonic sound and Vocoder High is polyphonic with some ensemble and unison detune added.

The modulator for both of these is the Voc Mod track (blue). It is also being sent out on a separate output to my FAT PCP330 Vocoder (the Beastie Boys’ vocoder), which has the Voc Car (green) track also being sent to it as the carrier. This was recorded onto the PCP Voc track (purple):

Vocoder Low

Vocoder High

FAT PCP330

Individually, none of these would cut the mustard but being layered together with some EQ, compression and reverb they sound just about right:

Chopping up the modulator signal combined with a staccato carrier can lead to some interesting patterns like this one in the outro, which is an interchange between the vocoder, guitar, EXS24 XP horn and Harpsichord. I’ve added the kick and snare for timing reference:

If you want to read more about vocoding (and what the difference between one and a talkbox is) have a look here.

Mix

I tend to mix as I go along, EQing things and bussing then when necessary so there’s not a tonne to discuss here that hasn’t been mentioned already. I think it’s worth discussing the sidechain compression, though, as the way I do this is quite particular.

Using the kick as a trigger, I first send it to a spare bus (5 in this case). Audio tracks allow compressors to use them as trigger without the need for a bus but my kick was out of the EXS24, so I sent to bus 5. I changed the send to a pre-fader send which means I can send a strong signal to the bus regardless of what my channel strip fader is on (-3dB for example).

Next, on the bus I ctrl + clicked the solo button to make it ‘solo-safe’ – this means the channel strip will not mute when you solo another channel strip – which is really useful when we want to adjust the release times on a sidechain compressor without having the kick actually active. Lastly I disabled the busses output so it’s not doubling the sound of our original kick.

I only used two send/returns in this track: a reverb coming from Logic’s Space Designer (using my favourite 1.7s_Blue Plate patch) and the delay coming from the Sound Toys Little Primal Tap (which is free). I used 192ms, which is roughly a dotted 1/16 note, using this online delay calculator to help me work that figure out.

N.B. Ensure your mix is set to 100% wet when using spatial effects on a send/return (or bus, as Logic calls it). Both of my send/returns were sidechain compressed, too.

Importantly I had visual aids Voxengo SPAN and Bram @ Smartelectronix.com’s s(M)exoscope on my master channel strip. The former is a spectral analyser to ensure my frequencies were in check, the later is an oscilloscope to keep my transients in check.

These tools aren’t there to replace your ears but merely confirm suspicions or help you identify things you might not have been able to otherwise. I’ll be covering master channel strip stuff in more detail at a later date.

Lastly I am a stickler for colour coding and keeping tracks named correctly and organised in some sort of logical order.

Here’s the whole arrangement; click on it to view it larger:

Mastering

Although this track was to be mastered by the client at a later date, I found it useful to mix into a limiter; the Waves L2 is pretty much my go-to for this. I used a threshold of -4dB and a ceiling of -0.3dB. However, when I came to export my finished WAV I disabled the limiter.

I was about 90% happy with the mix but I decided to do a small amount of post production to it in Ableton Live. The reason for this is because I prefer the way Live’s outputs works when recording audio back into the DAW from external equipment.

After pulling in the WAV from Logic I set the outputs to 3 and 4 and routed that through my TL Audio Ivory 2, recording the result to a new audio track. Once there, I added a few plugins.

Starting off with a couple of EQs, I used the Waves V-EQ4 and PuigTec MEQ-5 to ever-so-slightly colour the mix. I then ran this into an instance of PSP Vintage Warmer 2, using the LightDrivenTape preset and heavily adjusting the mix so it was quite subtle. Lastly there’s some very light compression from the Waves SSL G-Master Buss Compressor, which I’m a big fan of.