Sunday, March 20, 2016

Hipsters Day Off

"Hipsters Day Off" - well the title is because I couldn't think of a title and I was hanging around 'hipster bars' for my daughters birthday on a long weekend. It was a working title and I couldn't think of anything better and it seemed to fit. So there it is. I actually don't mind hipsters, they remind me of myself when I was a young 'un.



Anyways...if you go to my Yoooooo Tooooob channel, you'll see this.

I first made the song by playing acoustic guitar to a click track of 160 Beats per minute and I based the whole tune around that:

I worked on it on and off in between some very stressful weeks (as we all have in our lives from time to time).

I based it on these instruments:

Mandolin...actually it is a Bandolim...but that is another story...same tuning though...


 Geeeeetars...though the Bass guitar.... is the one that gets most of the limelight on this track - the others are very subtle and you can hardly hear the, as I wanted it to mainly acoustic.


Recorder - yes, I originally used a school quality recorder. It sounded as bad as those horrible school recorder concerts we were forced to sit through and be traumatized for life. My dreams of playing a recorder on track were simply dashed on playback. It sounded like a dog howling, a cat in a blender. wolves during mating season. It was horrible. I felt sad. Very sad. So I went back to one of my favourite VSTi's and gladly compromised my art to save your precious ears and used the Meltron flute VSTi instead:


I did however play a real live Harmonica - I wanted it to sound folky with a bit of the old Beatles echo on it, so I stacked on the reverb but harped on in real life, sticking only to the notes that wailed in key. I distorted it a little too to give it more muscle:



My original goal was to restrict myself to a totally acoustic song using acoustic instruments - kind of like the Irish-folksy stuff that was around a few years back. What I found was that:

(a) My sense of timing is still crappy
(b) My acoustic instruments at home are badly out of tune with each other

So I kept working on it until it sounded like a aural form of  hugging the ceramic throne after an excessive night out. It sounded horrible and so I left it for a while.


I tried to salvage it by hitting anything I could - including this practice drum pad which I actually kept on the recording in the second half.



If you listen carefully, you can also hear my hand claps - which are vaguely in time but not exactly - here is a picture of just one of my hands clapping in a non-Zen pose:

I also played our out-of-tune piano to try and give it some more 'acoustic' feel and you can hear it in the background.


Though the song sounds simple, I actually reworked it multiple times and here are the three DVD disks full of WAV files full of all the efforts and false starts. If you were one of the five people who listened to my first soundcloud upload of the song - thank you - I took it down again and reworked it until I thought I had better stop before going completely bonkers:


So here are the final tracks - the one called 'filler' is actually a combination of bounced down tracks from the previous efforts. The Drums were an on board loop from Sonar LE. Percussion was all live in my front room with natural reverb.



The clip itself is my usual patchwork style- again it looks quick but some parts took me a long time to layer. These are only just a few of the files:



So here's the clip:







and you can listen or download from here:

https://soundcloud.com/tim-oestmann/hipsters-day-off 


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