An old friend of mine asked me about one of my songs: "I liked the 5th Veil remix. Is that a guitar in there or synth? If it's a guitar, what are you playing, and effects are you using?"
He's referring to "The 5th Veil Remix" http://player.beatfreaks.com/?id=199
And this was my response. It was a bit long in the tooth so I thought I'd post it as blog, it case anyone else was interested.
Thanks, Jeff! Getting feedback from you means a lot to me. The instrument you're hearing is an Irish bouzouki, which I've been playing since 2000 and is featured on just about all of my Falik CDs.
Your answer will take a bit of explaining...
The 5th Veil Remix is so because the original was recorded by me playing the bouzouki live with some friends on hand drums at a restaurant gig about seven years ago. The entire track was improvised in my version of middle eastern scale (flat second, major third, flat seventh) as we were playing for belly dancers at that moment. I tune my bouzouki to A-E-A-D. (For more on that check out my wikipedia.org entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bouzouki )
The only original effect was a little reverb. However, when I produced the CD from which the track came from - "Solikk - More Than Live" (http://player.beatfreaks.com/?id=97) I panned the source to one channel, then delayed the output to the other, thus adding "space" to the mix - and a little "flanging", as well, though not so you would notice.
I didn't think to look for the original recordings when I started the remix - that thought never occurred to me. Thanks, Jeff, now I have to go find that.
So I took the recording that I used for the CD, added a low cut filter, a parametric filter spiking the 6k range, then chorus and flange. My goal was to get the bouzouki louder while not amplifying the hand drums too much, as both were on the same original track.
As i was creating the track I felt that I needed some harmonic support during some sections - the bouzouki and hand drums were sounding just a little too naked alongside the drum samples.
I was thinking of adding a bass track, but I hadn't set my mixer up yet, That would have involved cleaning my room, so I opted for a more clever approach and sidestepped the fact that I was walking on dirty clothes.
If you listen to just the bouzouki you will notice that at times I will play a full chord. I don't hold it for very long - maybe an eight note. I digitally sampled the chord, which I used for stabs at the beginning of the song. I then dropped it down to an octave, and sampled that to different intervals - a fourth, a fifth, and a major third, then stretched the samples out over 4 beats. The resulting sounds maintained some tonality but not much; there was a lot of transients and "artifacts". This usually happens when you over-process a signal that was crappy to begin with. I was toying around with what I had so far, laying the sounds over the original bouzouki track, trying to find something I liked. I found spots in the track where I wanted the sounds to go, but wasn't happy with the sounds themselves.
However, after a generous helping of more reverb (at least a 50% wet/dry mix), more chorus and flange, and some liberal attack/release editing I started to get something that sounded close to what I was looking for. It still wasn't satisfying me so I thought to reinforce what I've done so far with a midi synth track.
Halfway into getting the part I wanted I realized that the sound card in the laptop I was working on wasn't going to let me bounce down what I'd done to an audio track - or even mix down at all. I then searched my sound library for some string-like synth samples, which I found. I then did the same thing to those samples like I had done to my bouzouki samples. I had started having both the bouzouki and the synth samples play the same notes but I lost track of what I was doing.
I overlapped the parts and what I got was amazing. I was thinking that it was too bad that these tracks were "support". I had wanted to maintain the integrity of this sound as it's own sample so I mixed it down separately. As I was doing so, I got the idea of opening the song with it. It was just too good to hide underneath other tracks.
But waste not, want not, I actually did use it where I had planned, as well - in the last 8 bars of the track.
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