Under The Hood... Your Life
Track breakdown of "Your Life" with a download of the Ableton Session.
Its been a minute so I decided to dive into a more complex tune from the catalogue. There were many stages to get this tune over the line, from a raw demo, to a full song attempt, then flipping and remixing it into the final version. I decided to share just the final session of the track, instead of revealing every shitty idea along the way… but if you dive through the stems you’ll find parts from older versions.
Your Life
made: July 2023 | released: September 2023 | label: Verdicchio Music Publishing
The Demo
In December 2022 I was in the demo zone, writing new ideas from scratch, not aiming to finish anything. On December 5th I whipped up the initial idea for Your Life, but didn’t know it yet. You can listen to it here. The verse and bridge sections didn’t make the final cut, but the chorus stuck with me, along with a topline idea I’d recorded as a voice note. The demo features a drum loop I’d sampled from a record, along with live bass, rhodes and SH101. The whole thing was done in about 2 hours, then forgotten until July 2023.
Rhythm Section
The simplest part of the song: the drums. I made a loop on the MP2000xl sequencing some 909 samples. I shaved off some of the decay/release from these samples to make it sound a bit more choppy and artificial, adding to the punch in the final mix. I recorded the whole beat as a stereo track through some outboard EQ and compression. I aimed to keep things old school sounding – committing to the beat as a stereo recording helps with that. When structuring the song I used different parts of the same loop, utilizing shorter chops for fills and variation. The breakdown/bridge section features a mix of the demo drums with some added shakers/handclaps I recorded live. The bassline was played live on a P Bass, then heavily quantized and looped; more riff leaning than root notes, very fun to play. There’s a decent amount of post-prod on it, as it was tracked directly into an Electrodyne preamp with no other effects.
Synths/Guitar
The overall tonal palette is a mix of rhodes (from the original demo), a Waldorf micro Q pad, JV1080 vocal patch, and live guitar played on my trusty fender lead ii. The synths were tracked dry, gated/chopped/sidechained in ableton, then sent through outboard effects like chorus, reverb and delay, all of which added with their own digital grit/noise floor. When passing these synths through effects, I was keen to run them low on the input stage and high on the output to push the noise floor even higher. If you disable the EQs in the session you’ll hear all the noise that I had to sculpt out so that it wasn’t too overwhelming in the final mix.
The guitar process was a bit different. The warp algorithm I default to in ableton is “re-pitch” so when I alter the tempo of the project, the audio pitches up or down with it. In this case I slowed the project down when recording the guitar, and subsequently had to tune the guitar down accordingly. Once the guitar was recorded, I then returned the session to the original tempo of 125bpm, with the guitar pitched up and in key. This gives it an artificial/sampled sort of sound and feel. I recorded the guitar through a mix of space echo and midi verb II for chorus/stereo spread. There is a very small melodic part that was lifted from the demo version which was sequenced on the SH101. Some of the notes loosely slip out of key, adding some subtle edge.
The final lead melody was an afterthought and tied everything together. Using a Roland System 100 Model 101 – that I have on long term loan from a friend (thanks seb) – I played the cheeky post breakdown melody as a sort of joke solo, and then decided to chop it and keep it. The oscillator on that synth cuts through everything so easily, lifting that section way higher than it stood initially.
Vocals
Definitely the hardest part of writing and recording this song, as usual. I wanted the vocals to sound sampled, light hearted and dumb. There was no place for deep thought here. I already had the melodic idea down from the demo version, but lyrically I struggled with this for a while. It’s pretty embarrassing singing on a track like this if you don’t have the confidence. So on a day I felt the least cynical, I managed to get some takes, sung directly through the same space echo/chorus chain as the guitar. I comped various takes, did some formant shifting to tonally adjust different layers, and then ran them back out to more reverb and delay as a stereo track. The process of double baking the vocals made them sound even more sampled and digitally degraded. When tracking the second pass through, I intuitively adjusted the delay time on the space echo, adding little blips of pitching the vocals up and down, if you solo them it’s pretty apparent in the mix.
Processing
The goal of digital crunch, but not full blown lo-fi, was the ethos of this tune. Using VSTs like D16’s Decimort 2 for the aliasing effect, pushing digital noise floors up from outboard gear, slowing down and speeding recordings up, and multiple passes through low bitrate gear helped with all of this. I also did the most annoying process of recording the full track and demo onto the MPC2000XL, dropping the bitrate on the machine (which takes a long time to process and sometimes crashes the machine all together) then recording it back into the computer – an MPC summing mixdown if you will. This didn’t fully work out for the final recording, but I used snippets of it in the breakdowns, specifically the second short break. I then summed the whole mix through the board along with some EQ and buss compression. You can compare the various summing mixes in the project file too. I then passed off the final sum to Nik Kozub for mastering.
The Video
I had been helping my pal Jordan aka Wet Face aka Dr Cool with some mixing/production and in return he whipped up one of his world famous animated music vids for me. No notes!
ps. I have a new EP coming out on July 8th, you can pre-save it here.