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Description
Performance Credits:
Huy Dao – Lyrics, Vocals, Arrangement, Crystal
Mason A. Wolak – Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Percussion
08/20/07: Why We Travel started out as Mason fiddling around with a slide on an acoustic guitar. For most of its life so far, the song was simply "the slide acoustic song." A demo of the guitar part was originally posted on Mason’s page as The Ruse. I won't assume the reader has heard our other stuff, but let's just say that this song is a real departure for us.
First, the song, when conceived, was one instrument with plans for vocals. No big noise, riffs, or percussion to hide behind for me. It was my first stab, also, at writing anything with a melody. Most of our other music was rhythmically challenging, even tonally challenging, but my vocals have never been accused of being melodic. Second, we had no plans to make it anything other than guitar and vocals, so the mood of the vocals was purposefully dreary, 4AM on a Tuesday kind of stuff. If I knew the rest of the instruments would follow, I'm sure I would have tried to make the song more aggro.
The back story is that I didn't have much to record on and, following a motherboard crash, I was left with a cheap mixer, the sound card's line in, winamp, an outdated version of SoundForge, and a wireless karaoke mic. Despite the absolute sh*ttiness of the sound, we were able to get a feel for the song and Mason was off and running with new ideas for adding a bass line and some "simple" percussion (see picture below). A few back and forth drafts using Audacity and Tracktion, and we were ready to sit down and record.
We wound up recording vocals over completed guitar and bass with Mason's setup (described below). Percussion was recorded after we experimented with tuning champagne flutes and smoothing out some wood. Mason also decided to establish a new octave range for his voice in the chorus. And that's how it all came together.
One final note: be careful what you threaten. This song came about after I threatened to write a love song if Mason kept writing songs with complicated time signatures (cf. most of his other published material). Not exactly love, but the equally universal love lost.
Huy
Production Notes: The image below illustrates the items used to construct the percussion set; I’ll leave it to the listener to draw the connections. The bass was recorded D.I. into an Onyx 400F firewire interface. The guitar parts were recorded using either a Sennheiser e609 or JoeMeek JM37 mic fed into a JoeMeek SixQ channel strip, the output of which was fed into the Onyx via S/PDIF. The same signal chain was used for vocals, except that the Sennheiser mic was not used in this capacity. The percussion samples were recorded in a variety of manners, using both mics, sometimes with and sometimes without use of EQ and compression from the SixQ.
Huy Dao – Lyrics, Vocals, Arrangement, Crystal
Mason A. Wolak – Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Percussion
08/20/07: Why We Travel started out as Mason fiddling around with a slide on an acoustic guitar. For most of its life so far, the song was simply "the slide acoustic song." A demo of the guitar part was originally posted on Mason’s page as The Ruse. I won't assume the reader has heard our other stuff, but let's just say that this song is a real departure for us.
First, the song, when conceived, was one instrument with plans for vocals. No big noise, riffs, or percussion to hide behind for me. It was my first stab, also, at writing anything with a melody. Most of our other music was rhythmically challenging, even tonally challenging, but my vocals have never been accused of being melodic. Second, we had no plans to make it anything other than guitar and vocals, so the mood of the vocals was purposefully dreary, 4AM on a Tuesday kind of stuff. If I knew the rest of the instruments would follow, I'm sure I would have tried to make the song more aggro.
The back story is that I didn't have much to record on and, following a motherboard crash, I was left with a cheap mixer, the sound card's line in, winamp, an outdated version of SoundForge, and a wireless karaoke mic. Despite the absolute sh*ttiness of the sound, we were able to get a feel for the song and Mason was off and running with new ideas for adding a bass line and some "simple" percussion (see picture below). A few back and forth drafts using Audacity and Tracktion, and we were ready to sit down and record.
We wound up recording vocals over completed guitar and bass with Mason's setup (described below). Percussion was recorded after we experimented with tuning champagne flutes and smoothing out some wood. Mason also decided to establish a new octave range for his voice in the chorus. And that's how it all came together.
One final note: be careful what you threaten. This song came about after I threatened to write a love song if Mason kept writing songs with complicated time signatures (cf. most of his other published material). Not exactly love, but the equally universal love lost.
Huy
Production Notes: The image below illustrates the items used to construct the percussion set; I’ll leave it to the listener to draw the connections. The bass was recorded D.I. into an Onyx 400F firewire interface. The guitar parts were recorded using either a Sennheiser e609 or JoeMeek JM37 mic fed into a JoeMeek SixQ channel strip, the output of which was fed into the Onyx via S/PDIF. The same signal chain was used for vocals, except that the Sennheiser mic was not used in this capacity. The percussion samples were recorded in a variety of manners, using both mics, sometimes with and sometimes without use of EQ and compression from the SixQ.
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Mcboy
track.......simplicity with all the nrg of a full blown production.....love the percussion....melded perfectly.....vocal/bass melody is way kool......ipod worthy...highest complimet i can give.....all thumbs OP.....!!!!!!!!!!