CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 8: "SOUND EFFECTS RECORD NO. 27"
Album art by Ethan Redd
“SOUND EFFECTS RECORD NO. 27”
Audio Track Count: 94
Favorite Sound: Definitely the frog croak sound effect
Cutting-Room Floor: A breakdown segment that kept more energy rather than getting all wavy and hazy. Being more of a ska song than it is, I guess?
Inspirations: Fatboy Slim, the soundtrack of PC game The Neverhood, “Oldies but Happies” from the JSRF soundtrack, and any time that producers rap about elements of producing (“Antemeridian” by Count Bass D, “Raw Addict Pt. 2” by Quasimoto, “The Dig” by People Under The Stairs)
“Sound Effects Record No. 27” was a cascade of funny, strange ideas that all worked. It’s possibly the goofiest song I’ve made since an English teacher I had in high school jokingly challenged me and a friend to write a rap song about plastic fruit, and we came back with it as an actual song a few days later. It started as the song starts now–just a backbeat that sounded like a bouncy mechanical toy and a skank guitar hit. The song immediately had this cartoony feel that felt very tactile and appealing to me, so I kept adding unusual sounds that stuck out–wobby, farty synth sounds, a corny narrator voice and vintage sound effects. It very much felt like this was the song on the album that invited me to be as colorful and weird as I could get.
What if it was a song with a bunch of silly sound effects? Sure. What if it was a song with a rap verse from the perspective of a sample pack asking you to use it? Great, love it. What if the chorus… was ska? Perfect. I see a lot of positive reactions to this song–way more than I expected–but I also see people wondering what the hell I was thinking, and that’s great too. I usually enjoy a varied response because it means people are actually thinking about and evaluating each piece of my work as it comes out, rather than stanning my entire catalogue no matter what it is.
So, because this is a blog entry, I can actually tell people confused by “Sound Effects Record No. 27” what the hell I was thinking now. The point of this song is to show how much you can get away with sonically and still have it work. I visualize the sample-heavy “Jet Set Radio-esque” angle of my personal style as audio graffiti, the spirit of collage carried into music. The messier and more haphazard each piece, the better. Arranging disparate and surprising elements is not an unfortunate side-effect or a mistake, it’s the point. As I mentioned a little bit in this blog series before, part of the fun challenge of making music like this is seeing how much you can get away with before the human ear is overwhelmed.
However, overwhelming you with silly sound effects wasn’t the only point of “SFX Record” (tired of typing the whole thing) Samples and loops get a bad rap in music. I don’t think that’s any secret to anyone reading this who has ever had a cursory interest in music production or seen the way people react when they find out a piece of music they like is “just a sample”. What saddens me the most is seeing people who are new to music legitimately asking “is using samples and loops okay” and being met with harsh all-encompassing answers like “no one real uses samples/loops/presets” or “you will never learn how to actually make music if you rely on these things”. If I had taken these kinds of responses to heart, been told to turn my back on all this malleable audio gold that excited me into making full tracks, I might not even be making music at all now. I think things have changed since I first started to make music, which is great, but I still see this hesitancy around “revealing” that you use samples and loops. Well, fuck that.
“SFX Record” is a song that almost entirely uses pre-built samples and loops, and I’m egregiously putting these things to the forefront to say “This? Does this sound recycled and unoriginal to you?” I’m daring people to persist in saying that something original couldn’t be constructed with loops and samples. Just like anything else, they are a tool, no matter which form they take. Yes, even if you take something straight out of another song and loop it, that is a decision of an author and a moment of creation. It wasn’t looped like that before, was it? Maybe you’d face legal challenges for doing that, but there is no artistic rule stopping you. I think people have bought into the idea of samples, loops or presets being “cheating” to a point that they’ve deprived themselves of more creative options and time-saving resources that would allow them to make more music overall. And probably better music, because I’m not sure of the last time you checked in on them, but commercial drum samples have gotten really, really good.
Back to production talk for a minute–it was really hard to get the mixing on “SFX Record” right, especially the entire intro to the beat. The skank guitar/horn hits and bassline weren’t quite carrying the melody successfully and making it as “warm” as I wanted it to be. The very active jumpy drums and ridiculous amount of one-off samples gave everything a very jittery and harsh feel that needed to be tempered. I added that trombone-esque wobbly low-mid sound (which I had originally created for the beat-switch later) and it magically tied everything together. Love when that happens. I get to pretend I always knew what I was doing.
The breakdown section at 1:19 used to be much “drier”, basically just sounding like the previous section stripped down with the new vocals on top of it. It kept too much of that jittery energy and didn’t calm down enough. Fortunately, it ended up becoming one of my favorite parts of the song when I had the idea to “wash” over it, give a lot of the existing sounds reverb, deemphasize the drum beat almost entirely and have it reintroduced gently with a filter. I also had some big reverby filtered keys come in and add a lot of dimension to this moment. I see this whole song as kind of a “day at the beach” summery feeling, and this washy post-chorus moment feels to me like being in quiet awe as a massive, but not threatening, wave approaches.
This wave carries us right into the beat-switch and the vocal section of the song. I’ve talked about previous beat-switches as being a necessity if I were to find the energy to continue through a track. This one was more like a fun remix of elements that were already present, with a few new ones, the most striking being the half-time drum beat. The rap verse I did here is one of my favorites on the album. I tried to match my vocal tone on the album with whatever song I was doing, and I really liked the smoother, gentler one I found here. It’s more like molding an instrument with a unique purpose than just saying “it’s time for the rap part I do again!” every time. It also sounds great in stereo–I recorded the verse twice and panned the takes to opposite sides of the stereo field, which is a completely standard thing to do, but I’m making it sound cooler here because it’s a blog I guess. I always write lyrics best when I land on a really good and inexhaustible concept, and the idea of rapping from the perspective of a sample pack you bought that’s asking you to use it more was extremely appealing.
Guess I’ll dish out all the references I’m using: 24-bit and “96 k” is a high bitrate and sample rate for music production, and higher than the one I actually use (16-bit 44.1khz). A voice actor I once worked with gave me the concept of higher-quality audio being “thicker”, which I just like the feeling of. “Stereo separated with no phase” means stereo samples where the left and right channels have been rendered separately in mono to become a stereo sound when they’re put together as a set, and this avoids phasing issues that can be caused (and used creatively) by the timing of two similar recordings played back at the same time. “Loops” well, loop, and “one-shots” are singular standalone impacts or hits. Most drum samples are one-shots. “Royalty-free” means a sample can be used in your productions without owing royalties to the sample maker on whatever you earn from it. “Chopping” samples is the art of slicing audio into little bits and rearranging it into whatever form you want, usually to your beat. “Double-up” would be stacking the same sound twice and applying different audio effects to each layer to create a cool new sound. “Freezing” an arrangement is rendering any amount of production into one “frozen” audio file you can then treat like your own new sample. People sample pieces of their own original work this way, or even create a whole song just to turn it into a freeze and chop that to their heart’s content. Whew! All right. Hope you enjoy all that context.
On to the next section. It’s my belief that if you’re using Amen breaks in 2021, you should try to do something really cool with it, so I deep-edited it till it was like a wild drum solo front and center after my verse was over. It also integrated surprisingly well with the cartoony “boing” sound at 2:30. I recorded myself doing five different voices singing the horn melody for the “choir” at the end with my mind on the way the vintage choir sample from “Oldies But Happies” sounds. This whole run from the start of my verse to the end of the song is probably one of my favorite moments of the album, though 2:24-2:49 was another one of those moments with ear-numbing levels of sound action that I had to fine-tune for a pretty long time to get right.
Two last fun notes about this one–the title is based on the song from the soundtrack of the PC game The Neverhood, “Sound Effects Record No. 32”. It’s one of a few tracks you can find on a radio in the game, and it’s got a great concept: a narrator describes an impending sound effect comically, and then the sound effect is played, with you interpreting it as whatever you were told it was rather than what you might believe it to be if it was presented without description. The idea of presenting a song as a showcase of sound effects definitely played into the creation of “SFX Record”. (Word to the wise, though: before you spend any money on Neverhood stuff, head over to the Wikipedia page of the creator and check out the “Personal life” section! Yeah… that’s made it real fun to be a Neverhood enjoyer.)
Second fun note: several times during the mixing of this song, I would worry over the frog sounds either being too loud or too soft, and change them. Picture me in lockdown pacing around and saying “my frogs need to be louder!” or “my frogs are too loud!” over multiple months, and you’ve got a good idea of how this album felt to make.
That’s all for now—I’ll see you back here with a breakdown of “I Wanna Kno” on March 8!
(Above: Full view of the “Sound Effects Record No. 27” 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 of color are audio tracks, and the tighter multicolored bands of audio tracks are collapsed Groups, as you can see on the right.