(HW3) The hike: a track about nature, but it’s a 17/16 groove

It’s always interesting for me to reflect on my creative process and discover that my subconscious was working on something for weeks before deciding to fully reveal it. Let me start with an example! Now I know that the music I was making was inspired by fall all along, but I didn’t actually realize it until the very end, when I was searching for some ambient sounds (to fill the requirement). Almost automatically, I searched up water and leaf sounds. I quickly realized that I could bookend my off-center 17/16 groove with some leaf crunches and peaceful water whooshes. It just felt so right. 

So at the start, I played the water sound and the clip of someone walking on leaves at the same time. I panned the water to the right and automated the walking pan from left to right so that it sounded like you were walking towards the water (and automated the water volume to increase as you approached):

Spoiler alert: at the end of the piece, the opposite happens, so it’s like you’re walking away from the brook. (Although I think the water sorta overpowers the footsteps, in the future I would want to at least reduce the gain.)

I really liked the effect of introducing the groove modestly, with just the piano in the treble, as if it was emerging out of the leaf and water sounds. To enhance the “emerging” effect, I turned a nice chord from a somewhat out-of-tune Steinway upright (more on that later) into a reverby ambience that rises out from the rocks. I reversed the clip of the chord (removing the harsh attack at the beginning and creating a cool crescendo) and then automated a pitch shift from -12 semitones to original pitch. This ambient sound takes center stage at the same time as some aggressively reverbed piano arppegios.

I used different reverb plugins (just ones I had lying around) on two different recordings of the piano arpeggio (one with the mute pedal, one without). I played with the plugins, just twiddling until I liked it. I enjoyed the TSAR plugin’s dark effect. I ended up combining the two differently treated clips because it gave a prominent/full/surreal vibe that really stuck out later at the end of each groove cycle (4 repetitions of a 17/16 pattern… yes, I’m getting to that!).

Lighter use of TSAR reverb:

Gooey use of AUReverb:

I kept the water sound going in the background as a sort of sweep that crescendoed into the end of each groove cycle:

So you’re probably wondering about my groove. Yes, it’s in 17/16. I suppose I could have called it 17/8 (friendlier?) but what I really had in mind was that the clave sums to a 4/4 bar plus a single sixteenth beat. As for the actual grouping, it was 4+4+4+5 (sixteenths), which feels like shortish + shortish + shortish + a bit longer. On the 5-beat part, you get the effect of sort of rolling into the next cycle, which is why I emphasized this with the water sweep, as well as sustained notes in the piano and later, rhythmic intensity in the bass and drums.

Here’s the groove with just piano (try counting along):

And yes, this was just with acoustic piano. I got a reservation to a practice room in the Pauli Murray basement just in time, and I had an idea for a groove in 17/16 I wanted to try. To my initial chagrin, the piano was pretty badly out of tune, but I think it ended up adding character to something that was supposed to be wonky all along.

This is where I experimented most with mic placement. I had my dynamic cardioid Shure SM58 on a mic stand. It’s directional as heck, so you betcha I pointed that thing straight at the sound source.

You can also see my Scarlett Focusrite (NOT sponsored by Scott Petersen) on the nice carpet. Speaking of carpet, the soundproofing in here was pretty good (I think the panels on the wall are semi-soundproof). The best sound quality was pointing the mic as close to the source as possible, although there was a rattling on the right side of the piano so I only recorded from the left side. This meant that less of the rattly sound reached the mic, while minimal room noise was mixed in, either (because the room sound was very flat). I liked the flatness for this particular groove because I was going for something almost mechanical and as clear as possible.

As a cheap dynamic mic, the SM58 was great at capturing my mostly mid-range groove sounds. You’ll notice though that there’s a bassline in the clip above. That’s just EQ’ed piano. I know, right?? I EQ’ed the heck out of the piano, trying to compensate for the abysmal bass frequency response by increasing the gain near 100hZ for the bass. I also sorta aggressively minimized everything else. In the future, having learned about frequency filters in class, I would simply use a bandpass filter to isolate the bass area (much simpler)! I was so pleasantly surprised with how bassy the EQ made the piano sound. I think it’s largely because removing the high frequencies removes the very timbrally-characteristic piano attack sound.

I also used compression on the bass (I didn’t know what the parameters meant so I was going by ear) and sidechained it to the drums to create space for the kick (although I personally could only hear a subtle improvement).

Oh yeah, the drums. So I had this idea for a drum beat where I would take the most agonizingly typical 4/4 loop (the Sanfillippo 140 bpm pattern) and then add an extra 16th-note kick at the end to make it 17 sixteenths. (On the fourth cycle of 17/16, I added an extra cymbal hit to make it 17). I did this by rendering the loop and then splicing and reshuffling.

Transitioning into the beat was even more fun. In this section, see if you can hear how the water sweep crescendoes and then falls out for a split second, leaving space for the drums to bombard. Also, you can hear how the piano fill halts and lingers when the drums come in (I just time-stretched the chord it was playing).

After a two cycles of the full 17/16 groove with all the instruments, I wanted to spice it up by modulating randomly/wonkily. I put all the harmonic instruments into a folder (selected the tracks -> “Create folder track containing…”), and then put a pitch shift automation on the folder. That was fun. At the same time, I experimented with dropping out the drums at carefully placed moments, to make the listener’s ears perk up and be a bit less surprised by the crazy pitch changes.

My favorite moment was when I tried dropping out the groove completely, just as there was a big build/pitch-shift/crescendo upwards! It resolves into the leaf crunches and water, as discussed earlier. I also held a piano chord over this, using the same technique of reversing it and drenching it in reverb (biggest room size!):

But this wasn’t enough. I had been building up to something inexorably with that aggressive 17/16 groove, and now I was taking the big risk of halting suddenly and going somewhere different (more internal/peaceful/introspective?). I thought, the human voice is very powerful. Like, a nice vocal harmony was probably powerful enough to match the groove. I choose a fat D chord with a bunch of tensions, including the 5, #5, 6 and 9. Including both the 5 and 6 spaced out, IMO, makes it hard to tell if it’s a (hopeful) D major chord or a (darker) B minor first-inversion, so I guess it’s in the middle??

I used my Shure SM58 (singing directly into it to give it a really close sound) and accidentally had my fan on behind me (but I ended up keeping it because it gave my voice the perfect airy quality). Autumn breeze?

I hope you enjoyed my self-analysis here. I’m so excited to check out the other projects! Here is the full mp3:

The Hike