CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 4: "DANCE WITH U LONG"

Album art by Ethan Redd

“DANCE WITH U LONG”

Audio Track Count: 55

Favorite Sound: Pretty proud of the bassline on this one

Cutting-Room Floor: A vocal sample that I decided was too risky to use was gonna take the place of the flute part

Inspirations: Treacherous Three and Kurtis Blow, general breakdancing era of hip-hop, funk, 70s synth music

“Dance With U Long” started as a collection of very satisfying timbres. First it was just the talkbox vocal with the satisfyingly clicky and scrape-y acoustic guitar backing, then I added the repeating percussion element that married really well with the guitar. I must have listened to just those sounds together for months. No drums, no song structure, just that intro. When I talk about how this album needed to simmer in my brain, this kind of thing is what I mean.

But it wasn’t a blockage–there was something about these elements together that immediately announced an interesting song idea to me, and since I was trying to make this album track after track of “where’d he pull THIS stuff out of now!!!” reactions, it was a lock right away. As I continued to make this song, I realized there was a particular style that I was building everything around; 70s-80s hip-hop, specifically the kind of songs that pipe in “live” sounds to make you feel like you’re at a party or in a crowd.

The inclusion of crowd sounds under a sparse arrangement of drums, guitar, electric piano and bass (with a focus on that bass and percussion) was a direct reference to songs like “Feel The Heartbeat” above, and the famous Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks”. It would have been nice to actually get a live crowd together to record throughout the song like they did, and I’d still like to do that someday for another song. I wanted to make a track that made people feel like they were in a lively place for a couple minutes, that might inspire a little dancing on your own if it comes on while you’re just at home.

“Dance With U Long”, similar to the first two tracks on the album, has a ridiculous amount of layered percussion put together to form what sounds like a pretty simple and unified beat in the end product. There are shakers, congas, multiple hi-hats, layered kicks, claps AND snares, all just for the right amount of humanized energy. There was a lot of push and pull with the volume and frequencies of the bass, but I think I ended up with a bass guitar that is melodic, deep enough to have “modern” levels of bass and fills the low end of the track up nicely. I can’t tell you how many times I would put a mix on in my car on a drive and be filled with dread as soon as the first bass note played, knowing I would be back to tweaking its levels in an hour. Perhaps for this reason, it became my favorite part of the song once I finally nailed it.

Despite wanting to keep the song simple with only a few instruments and the talkbox samples, there is a bunch of other stuff that pops in its head here and there, as will be the usual for how I structured stuff on this album. I wanted a lot of short but sweet appearances of cool sounds, things to leave you wanting more without knowing that if you got more, it’d actually be too much and get old fast. Trust me, I cut everything off at its due end. Like the melodic pitch-bent vocal sample that appears at 0:56–I actually thought that sound might be too annoying so I used it pretty sparingly. I’m really proud of the way I chopped it at 1:24. The fat analog synth lead first appearing at 1:41 was a sound with a lot of unexpected design going into it–I was listening to Nigerian dance music at the time and wanted to get that tape saturation feel you get from older synth recordings, but I didn’t want to push it over the edge into territory where it was too raw or too obviously “distorted”, just warm and fuzzy. I didn’t succeed because these synths are just way too fucking cool, but I did a good enough job.

As I mention in the intro to this blog, the flute part (1:54 to 2:22) used to be a much more standard part–the guitars still filtered out to be all wah-wah and cool in the background, but I was just introducing a new vocal sample instead of a new lead melody. The flute adds this Big Moment to the whole song, and a lot of people have remarked on its inclusion! Sometimes a last-minute change that you think isn’t as good ends up being something really special.

Speaking of something really special, here’s a weird story: I know The Matrix was a movie pretty much everyone got on DVD, but I had it on VHS and the VHS actually still had the special feature segments from the DVD on it. “Stay tuned after the movie” and they’d just load all the features in after it was done. I was obsessed with this movie and its soundtrack, and there was this segment showcasing concept art called “What is the Concept?” that had even more music! It’s all production library electronic music, but it was good and not generic! And as a kid who had pretty much just found out about electronic music through this movie and did not live in an area where it was popular, I needed all that I could get.

There is a particular song that starts off the featurette with several good vocal samples including one that goes “Ha-ha, that’s right kid” (0:19 in the video above). I really loved the way it was delivered but could never stumble upon this vocal sample myself, so I decided to just record it in my own voice. A lot of the stuff on this album is an homage to that first explosion of electronic music in my life, so I was happy to be able to do a little ode. Also, looking up this video again, I see that all the music has been found now! BRB, listening to high-quality versions of that stuff for the first time.

The last thing I want to talk about with “Dance With U Long” is the floaty, reverberating breakdown moment (2:22 - 2:49). I mentioned in my first blog entry that there were gonna be a lot more “shoegaze moments” in the album, these breakdowns where a lot of the percussive elements switch out with more introspective and peaceful sounds. I think music like this needs as many breathers as you can give it, as long as the breathers themselves are also full of cool stuff. I got a really cool pad-like effect here from sampling the flute and pitching it down–you can hear it really clearly at 2:29 in the background, and it gives a unique texture to the whole moment. The synth lead guides the triumphant march out of the breakdown, and I get to bring back the earlier feel of the song before the ending. With my songs, I often like to return to the initial energy one more time before ending the track if I can–especially songs that go through as many changes as these do.

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of “Dance With U Long”. It’s more song-focused and less of a big-picture album production tale this time, but they can’t all be connected to a big life event or larger process!

That’s all for now—the blog will be taking a short week break to catch up and I’ll see you back here with a breakdown of “Noize The Invasion” on February 8!

Above: Full view of the “Dance With U Long” mixdown in Ableton Live. Most DAW programs arrange music from left to right on the timeline, so the left end is my intro and the right end is my ending, with every sound placed in a linear fashion. The rows are audio tracks or grouped tracks—I called them “layers” in my description to match how listeners probably more commonly think of them.