Harmonies hide bum notes: musical notes on Haiku

A tricky beast, is my October track for Sestu (original post here).

The two acoustic sections for the beginning and end were recorded as one, though always with splitting them in mind. Both sets of lyrics are haiku, though as I explained earlier the first is the more proper in the Japanese tradition. The time signature is the interesting bit, three repeating bars to match the sound pattern of a haiku poem: one bar of 5 beats, the next 7, then another of 5. It creates a nice circular feel as it goes around each time, I feel. You can count them out along with the first verse the 1 of the first bar of 5 is on the word "leaves" and the second bar begins on the second word "catch," with the extra two beats (6 and 7) on "mid-day" and then "sun" is the 1 of the third bar of 5 beats.

Two acoustic guitars are panned hard left and right, one playing the same chords but in a different shape with a capo to create a slight contrast between them. The solo is played on the mermaid guitar itself over the top of these two, recorded with a room mic at a decent distance from the instrument to give it a natural reverb.

Screen shot of left-side harmonies

Like the guitar the heavy vocals harmony parts are panned hard left and hard right. The screen grab here shows the left side: 7 vocal tracks of varying pitches (and quality! - you can see from the names I give them when editing that there are some dodgy notes, but I learned from this that 'choral' singing really does hide the bum notes). There's an 'answering' set of harmonies on the other side, though this one only has seven voices. I usually make up harmonies on the fly as I record, so there are always plenty of bum notes. I record listening to the main vocal, improvising a harmony, though obviously I have an idea of what it sounds like in my head beforehand. Then I repeat the section, normally keeping all the takes. Then later on I'll listen to the whole lot, taking each one in turn, labeling them as I go to indicate the pitch and quality. Some I just delete or mute.

The left side harmony sounds like this:

From there the electric segment kicks in, but that's probably best left for another post. Time to leave you humming "Leaves catch midday sun..."