PatternRecognition.mp3: adding an intro & bridge, pushing the limits

Here's the latest cut of the song (DreamingInTechnicolor_PatternRecognition2.mp3 2.62MB, 2:51). The name of the song has been changed from AfterImage to PatternRecognition, since the new bridge part flips the song's focus away from the AfterImage and zeroes in on Pattern Recognition. It also honours the William Gibson influence. Since I started the song, I've been re-reading Gibson's book, Pattern Recognition, and there some cool resonances with it. I love Gibson's central theme: "We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition..." And I've come to realize that the process of song writing is a form of pattern recognition itself. Captured beautifully by Gibson's phrase: "He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots." er, well, maybe not that one, but definitely "She has no way of knowing how she knows." I think one of the reasons I'm writing this at all is to try and figure out how my own creative process works, where the music comes from, with the vague hope of trying to help it along. So, here it goes...

After listening to the previously posted version of the song (1:55, 1.8M), I wanted to focus on adding an intro and bridge / chorus to the song to give it more structure, so I stripped it down to just the drums and the string riff and tried out some ideas with the VL70m. The result (0:16, 265K) was really lacking in any focus or drive, so I went back to the piano voice to try to get a more percussive and chordal feel going (take2 0:17, 274K). Which was totally at odds with the rest of the song, so I kept taking away notes until all that was left was the bass line, which really works for me. So I added it to the bass guitar track and then beefed up the bass sound by layering the VL70M DampBass voice with a fingered bass voice from my old Gravis Ultrasound PnP sample set and a Deep Bass sample, also adapted from some samples for the Gravis. To me, the best part of the vocal at this point was the echoed 'into the rhythm', so I extended the feel of this section to add in a layered background vocal for the night-club sequence. I re-used the new bass line from the intro to lay the foundation for the bridge section, and then shifted it around in the song until it felt right. I really wanted to change the feel of the song at this point, so I took one of the vocal samples I'd recorded, pitch shifted it down an octave and stretched it 2x and then applied some random pitch shifts to get this (0:33 529K). I also added an ascending string line to build up a chordal kind of progression. This was the first time I had a bit of a shiver up my spine with this song. Felt like I was on the right track.

I'd been thinking about ways to extend the meaning(s) of the song, and the one angle that I liked the best was to focus on capturing the way the mind works (perhaps, in retrospect, inspired by Jim Morrison's 'Celebration of the Lizard'). The song itself can be read as some kind of journey into the subconcious and the surfacing of some thought to the conscious 'light of day'. The only reason mammals like us are able to do anything interesting is that we can remember things, recognize patterns in what we've previously experienced and apply that to the present and future. It is so fundamental to us that we take it for granted. But it is also bound up in the creative process; we take all of these different bits and pieces of memory and combine them together in new ways, prodding the process with new stimulii from the outside world, and reassembling them in novel ways that feel somehow 'beautiful' or 'meaningful'. There's a great book called "The Creative Process" by Ghiselin that compiles letters from Einstein, Van Gogh, Mozart and others where the authors try to outline how their creative process works - highly recommended! (BTW, no surprise, my brain doesn't work like Mozart's!) There's also this Zen thing about catching your brain in the act - I have a hunch that the sound of one hand clapping is really an analogy for the left brain / right brain duality - the conscious left side of the brain isn't really in the driver's seat, it just THINKS it is. Is it possible to really get this stuff into a song, though? Should it even be attempted?
Once again, my approach to this was to not try to think too much about it but to get the music going and to free-associate while it was playing. After cleaning it up a bit, here's the result:

Bridge:
Flashbulb, feedback, Pattern Recognition
Seed crystal, flashback, Pattern Recognition
Precog intuition, Pattern Recognition
Visionary insight, distant memory, instant recall, Pattern Recognition
REM sleep, dream memory, Pattern Recognition
Time lapse, holographic, synapse, neural network
Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition

[Click here to see the lyrics for the entire song]

What I was trying to do was to set up some cognitive dissonance by using similar words and rhymes and sort of 'pre-create' words like flashback out of flash bulb and feedback and go deeper and deeper into the subconcious and physical processes until a 'eureka moment' of pattern recognition.

To get the right feel in the recording, two takes were recorded, both whispered. The MPX110 pitch shifting + delay was used for the first, the second was treated with Cakewalk FxFlange (Heavy stereo, full mix) and Cakewalk FxDelay (2 delays, Left to right with feedback). A slight delay was unintentionally introduced in the first take after 'distant memory' when I had to catch my breath, which causes a timing mismatch with 2nd take from this point on. This really works for me - it creates a lovely 'spread' between the two vocals, adding to the tension. Here's what the song sounded like at this point (2:36, 2.5M). It felt like the song was building and building and then just ran out of gas.

I got stuck for a while at this point. I tried 4 or 5 different approaches to try to get it to the next level, but none of them worked. After several days, I finally realized what was bugging me: I liked the bridge without the whispered vocals better than the version with the vocals. I finally figured out that I liked the sound of the weird pitch shifted vocal sample and the string progression, but both of these were getting lost in the vocals. So I delayed the whispered vocals until after the pitch shifted vocal sample and really built up the string progression, and then climaxed it with 2 'pattern recognition' sung samples. And that's where it stands right now (2:51, 2.6M).

Right now, the drum line is the thing that I feel needs the most work. Larry Mullen of U2 is my favourite drummer; listening to how he drums demonstrates how important drums are to a song. The song as it stands is very 'linear' right now; the drums just repeat and don't build up or change intensity during the song. So that should be the next thing to tackle.

Brian
http://www.dreamingintechnicolor.com