Submitted to DistroKid | Hyperfollow page here
I wanted to slow back down a bit and do something a little lighter than Come With Me with a less serious lyrical tone. I set the BPM to 100 and put in a drum beat.
Lyrically the concept is about the idea of us currently living in a simulation while our real selves are cryogenically frozen in space after the failure of a space mission. (i know its odd, but thats what came out.. dont know what to tell you). It was supposed to be kind of silly / dark humor, but it didn’t really come out that way. Its asking a matrix-like question of if you knew you were actually frozen in space and could be recovered, would you want to wake up from the simulation? My answer, probably no.
It posed some challenges. I got wrapped up in the idea of having that extra count before the first chorus. Spent a bunch of time just trying to get that to feel good. Im not sure it worked but i do feel like theres something in there. It pushed the rest of the track out one count into the normal grid and messed with me a bit with timings later in the track.
I’m experimenting with a new effect – Valhalla Vintage Verb – and am playing with settings, and ways of using it in general.
The more I tried to work on this, the worse I felt it was getting. I decided to let it be and close the book on the track. I like the way it sounds overall, I have a few gripes but im OK with them.
Final Version Version 2 (05-13-2020):
I’m mostly just tinkering with vocal effects and ways i can mix it, i still plan on replacing the takes. I did do some adjustments to effects and EQ and compression on various layers. I thickened up the electric bass in the first (no vocal) chorus. I adjusted the kick drum during the bass solo to better align with the bass part. My new mic comes tomorrow and I’m excited to try new takes with it (hopefully tomorrow). Testing out High-Balanced LANDR settings for more compression, which i usually do not use (this version has it, last was open-medium)
Version 1 (05-11-2020):
I got my first rounds of feedback and started making adjustments.
Vocals got a bunch of cleaning, trying to pull out anything that kind of muddies up the sound of them they still arent good. I still want to re-take them but its unclear how long my new mic is going to take to get here. They still dont fit right and need more work but i need to go to bed.
A bunch of eq’ing adjusting saturation, compression, distortion etc just to get things cleaned up a bit and finer tuned in their sound.
I will probably still work on the ending more yet, a new take possibly there with a new melody or something.
The bass solo area needs a little adjusting with timings and feel.
More tuning of effects on various layers still wanted.
Subtractive eq’ing of vocals more still needed.
Notes from feedback:
The 2nd chorus vocal needed to stick around longer
The pulsing reverb synth got to loud in db
Vocals were too hard to understand layers were clashing
The wobbly bass in the 2nd verse has mixed opinions
structure complete (05-09-2020) Theres a fair bit of refinement needed I think. The high end feels lacking still, the mix does not feel right. The vocals I want to re do when my new microphone gets here, if it takes too long i may do a new take on a SM 58 instead.
Early Concept
I got a few hours in over the weekend on it and maybe 2 hours during the week since then. So its still very early phase of the track and not quite ready to post yet.
I have posted some early exports to the IMF discord.