Musical notes on Haiku Part 2

I agonised over the transition between the folksy acoustic (as described in part 1 of these musical notes) and the rocky parts of the tune. The simple, acoustic layers were always to be set against the dry, harsh boppiness of the electric segment. The idea was to represent the two sides of the changing seasons in Japan: a quiet contemplation of the transience of nature with its melancholy reminder of our own temporary existence as opposed to the rushed, obligation of modern social mores.

In the end for the transition out of the acoustic into the electric I went with a short solo blast of the bass line that pumps along throughout.



I'm actually playing my bass here (in other words it's not a sample or anything) but with a sequencer effect on it, the kind usually used for keyboards, which gives it that pulsing effect.

Ant-lines on the highway, marching along to the rhythm...

The waveform inside Sonar (the program I use to record and mix) makes this plain, the regular blobs of the top one with the effect on and the screen grab under it with the effect off.



I rarely put effects on my bass lines but it seemed to fit here, since this section was meant to sound 'metropolitan.'

As for the rest of the tune, I took the sound of The Strokes Is this it? as a template: crunchy, slightly distorted drum sound; two guitars, one on either side of the stereo spectrum, playing Strokes-like riffs; the whole tune is short and punchy. In earlier mixes I had a distortion effect on the vocals too, a signature of the Is this it? sound, but in the end I just didn't like it, especially with the rich harmonies in the haiku that forms the start of the second verse:

Melancholy I
Gaze upon soon gone mellow,
Red-yellow colours 

Lyrically, I wanted it to be prosaic to emphasise the lack of spirituality in the mechanical annual trek to hunt red leaves: how many songs have lyrics about uploading pictures to your desktop or buying omiyage?

The 'winding down' effect was the last thing I settled on with this track, as the rocky section reverts to the folk ending. It's achieved with a very basic sampling tool built into Sonar called Alias Factor, on a setting called 'Wooly Mammoth,' which appealed. Basically I faded out the guitars gradually, leaving the pulsing bass from the beginning higher in the mix, while applying this sampler to the drum track. Basically it down-samples the sound it receives into a more and more basic digital quality level so that by the end it sounds like a sound effect in a retro computer game.

This post is another in a series on my album Setsu, 12 songs in 12 months to celebrate life in Japan.