CARRIAGE MOVEMENT EP

by Z+S

Mster en Sonologa MSON - 2012/2013

Corrado Scanavino

_ Abstract
I decided to produce a record as my Masters project to immerse myself
into artistic and technical music production. What I present here is an EP,
comprising five songs written by Sumcho and I and including input from four
other musicians.
All sounds have been recorded at home and in studio, then mixed paying
close attention to the coexistence of acoustic and electronic rhythms. I will
describe the whole process in detail, from the rehearsals and writing of the
songs, to the mixing and mastering of them.
The music is a mixture of various genres, spanning along experimental
electronic, progressive rock, jazz, punk and noise. Enjoy.

_ Index
1. Introduction Page 1
2. Pre-Production Page 2

2.1 Rehearsal location

2.2 Rehearsals Page 3

2.3 Writing down songs
Page 3

2.3.1 Starting From a Rhythmic Idea

2.3.2 Starting From a Harmony/Melody

2.4 Recapitulating Page 4

3. On Studio Production and Rearrangement

Page 5

3.1 Recording Drums Page 5

3.1.1 Recording Setup

3.1.2 First Session (Oki Doki)

3.1.3 Second Session (Quid Quillo)

3.2 Recording Guitars Page 10

3.3 Mixing Drums and Changing Section Durations.

3.4 Recapitulating Page 11

4. Post Production Page 12

4.1 Preparing songs for the mix

4.2 Mixing, Re-Rearranging and Finishing Touches
Page 13

4.3 Mastering Page 16

5. Conclusions and Acknowledgment

Page 17

_ Bibliography Page 18

1. Introduction
This work began in April 2013, with the intent to produce a record with
ideas and material developed for two concerts around May/June of the
same year.
The work contains five songs, for a total duration around twenty-five
minutes, written by Zenjiskan (me) and Sumcho. The structure of the record
and the form in which the songs are compiled, suggest the notion of an EP.
The motivations that led me decide to produce an original record as my
Masters project were the desire to bring out new experimental music, and
to immerse myself into artistic and technical music production.
The musical instruments used in the production of this record are:
Analog synthesizers, an Arduino based digital synthesizer, a self-built
Monome, an Akai Mpd, Novation Launchpad, drums, guitars, objects and
field recordings. All sounds have been recorded at home or in-studio,
except for a few rhythmic elements taken from a sample library for Ableton
called Konkrete1.
During studio production, other musicians were involved, letting them
hear the raw, basic tracks and then invited to play improvising with their
instruments, mostly guitars and drums. During one of this session, when
recording drums, I decided to add live drums to every track, hence an extra
studio session was programmed especially to record drum sections.
The music we propose is a mixture of genres such as experimental
electronic, ambient, indie rock, jazz, punk and noise. I call it
undanceable.
I present this EP as my Masters project, and also as my new musical
product, following the self-produced compilation called Early Wrks LP2.

1 https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/konkrete-drums-2/
2 http://zenjiskan.bandcamp.com/album/early-wrks-ndncblzero

2. Artistic Pre-Production
The collaboration between Sumcho and I began in March 2013, when I
propose him to play together a gig I was invited to play alone. He said ok to.
Since then we started to talk about which kind of music wed like to do, set up all
our instruments and began rehearsing.
2.1 Rehearsal Location
As a rehearsal location, we choose (for the lack of alternatives) my home
studio in an attic in Raval. It is a small room, 1.5 x 3 meters long, capable of
hosting two or three people at most. It has a beautiful view toward the Tibidabos
mountain and the rooftops of Raval, with plenty of inspiring (and noisy?) old
analog TV antennas.
Here we had already jammed and recorded stuff, such as a long noisy and
annoying improvised session, which later I decided to produce as a four live
pieces LP, called Lluvias3. This was the starting point for our new project.

Figure 1 Our rehearsal location, my home studio.

Figure 2 A view from my home studio.

3 http://zenjiskan.bandcamp.com/album/lluvias

Artistic Pre-Production

2.2 Rehearsals
There were five rehearsal sessions, around six hours each, spread
between two months. During each session, the basis of a song had been
written. There were a few extra sessions, in order to compose additional
sections or to add more instrumentation to existing ones. This led us to five
demo tracks.
The two concerts we performed in May and June, during which we
added more live instruments and voices, could also be considered as
rehearsal time. Later we decided to include in the record some of the ideas
developed during these live performances.
2.3 Writing Down Songs
We basically employed two methods to begin writing the songs. But
before that, in every rehearsal, we have spent some time playing around
with our instruments, and investigating over timbres. We were also talking
a lot about what sound we wanted to achieve and which sounds we
needed to get it.
2.3.1 Starting From a Rhythmic Idea
One method was improvising some percussive rhythm with an Akai Mpd
and then using this base, adding chords with a polyphonic synthesizer and/
or a simple melody/bass-line with a monophonic synthesizer.
Once we got the basic rhythm (and therefore tempo) and a few chords,
we started looping them with Ableton Live, eventually adjusting the
tempo. After we started thinking on a progression for the song, like a
change of emotional status or ambience, and consequently trying to apply
changes to the percussive rhythm and the harmonic rhythm, evolving
toward the direction we wanted to go, such as creating intensity, pain,
happiness or whatever other feeling we could imagine.

Artistic Pre-Production

2.3.2 Starting From a Harmony/Melody

The other method was the opposite, i.e. by starting with a chord, a chord
progression or a kind of harmonic rhythm, and then layering a percussive
rhythm over it, again with the Mpd or with the Monome, which allowed
us to play live and loop in real-time. Also, Ableton helped us organize
the workflow, such as creating separate sections of the song, and rapidly
recalling them to add new instrument or copying one section, playing it
with some of the instruments muted and so on. And hence Ableton was,
inevitably, involved as part of the compositional process.
2.4 Recapitulating
Five unfinished songs were produced after two months of rehearsing.
All of them were built up in Ableton and had been used for two live
performances, triggering each basic section of the songs with the Novation
Launchpad and playing around and over them. Up to this point the
instruments employed were:
-

Ableton
Akai Mpd
Dave Smith Tetr4
Dave Smiths Mopho
Novation Launchpad
Samples
Electric guitar
Shure 57
Field recordings
Max/Msp

All sounds were recorded at my home studio, with an Apogee Duet

sound card, some of them through a Mackie 1402-VLZ3 mixer, others
directly through Duet or a PreSonus TubePre V2 valve pre amplifier.
Therefore comes the studio session.

3. On Studio Production and

Re-arrangement

The five tracks written were not complete, we only had time to develop
the basic ideas but not evolve them into finished songs. I always though
something was missing, and during the studio sessions I realized what
it was. The acoustic sound of a full drum kit, recorded with top quality
microphones like the ones at the Esmucs studio. Once mixed, I felt in love
with that sound (or noise, isnt it?), of a real drum kit played by a real
human drummer, or at least someone who really enjoyed playing it.
Initially, I was thinking about just re-recording some guitar sections,
invite some friends to play some riffs or fills with guitars, violin, piano or
any other acoustic instrument, to add to some interesting details to the
songs. I had planned at most two sessions and then employ the rest of the
studio time to re-arrange and mix down all the tracks. But, after inviting
a drummer to the first studio session, and mixing the recorded tracks at
home, I decided to concentrate my effort in studio to record drum sections,
and move the mixing time to my home studio.
3.1 Recording Drums
I recorded all drum sections during two studio sessions, with three
different drummers and two drum kits. In both cases a sonologist helped
me with drum placement, microphones and cables, if it werent for him Im
sure I wouldnt have obtained the same result (so thanks dude!).

On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

3.1.1 Recording Setup

I placed the drum in one of the corner of the recording room,
surrounded by absorbent panels, as shown in the picture below, since I was
trying to get a clean and less reverberant sound, to process it later.
I used a very similar microphones setup for the two sessions.

- Bass Drum: the Subkick and
AKG D112 in front of the kick, one
or two inches from it, with the 112
closer to the center than the Subkick.
Then a Shure 57 inside the bass
drum, near the membrane hit by the
pedal, to capture the punch. Dynamic
microphones were used due to the
heavy attack and strong vibrations
produced by the kick.

- Snare: a Shure 57 in the
upper part, pointing closely to the
membrane towards the Border of
the snare. Also two tiny condenser
microphones Akg C 518 set up
very close to the upper and lower
membranes, to capture the color as
well.
Figure 3 Setting up the first recordin session.

- Goliath and Toms:
Sennheiser 421, one of the most popular large diaphragm dynamic
microphones, suitable to capture the strong, punchy sound of the Toms.

- Hi Hat: a pen style Shoeps (cannot remember the model), little
diameter condenser microphone, hypercardioid polar patter, placed in the
upper part of the Hi Hat, pointing towards the center of it, slightly oriented
towards the wall to decrease lacking from other drum parts.

On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

- Plates: a pair of Akg 414 condenser microphones, with a cardioid
polar pattern, placed at the two extremes of the drum kit area, one meter
away from the plates, pointing at the center of the drum, slightly oriented
towards the plates.

- Ambience: an Neuman U87 in the corner of the room, behind the
drummer, two meter above the ground, pointing at the drummers head.
3.1.2 First Session (Oki Doki)
The first session was planned to record some rhythmic samples, not only
for our project, but also for the drummers solo project and to record an
improvisation between the drummer and another electronic musician. But
the electronic musician canceled the day before the studio session, so I
talked to Oki Doki (the drummer) just before the session started and asked
him if he would agree to play over our demo songs, which he agreed to.
Another musician was present at the session, so I asked him to play guitar
together with the drummer.
After a long improvisation between the two, we went out to lunch, and
when we came back we started recording three of our five songs. I let them
hear our songs for the first time, and asked the drummer to play some
rhythm according to the tempos of the songs, but above all to feel free to
improvise everything that he thought was good. I tried to explain that I
love his playing attitude with his band, especially when he comes out with
strange plates sounds and sudden rhythm changes. And that was all, we
started the session.
In this occasion, I created a long version of our songs, repeating every
section two or three times, to lengthen the songs to around ten minutes
to give the musicians time to think about what to do and possibly repeat
interesting ideas several times. I did a separate mix for both players to let
them listen to each other while listening to the song.
About 40 minutes of music were recorded, without click track, with
barely any pause between each of the three songs.

On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

3.1.3 Second Session (Quid Quillo & Mariana)

For the second session I planned to record drums for the two remaining
songs of the EP. This time I decided to invite two other different drummers,
to get some contrasting drum styles into the same record.
The first drummer was Mariana, while the second was Quid Quillo, a
friend from NY who had already heard the songs before. Also present at
the seesion where the first guitarist and Sumcho.
This time I decided that the drummers should play over the original
versions of the songs, and to record a few takes for each one. I told
Mariana to play whatever she wanted, to have an experimental approach
and investigating over timbres. Three very experimental takes came out.
We recorded a lot of ambience sounds, especially with the plates.
Then it was Quid Quillos turn, who played each song three times,
together with some punch-ins for specific sections. This time the click track
was set in Pro Tools.
It was a pleasure for me to see Quid Quillo playing on our songs and
also to record him. Unfortunately the sound of the drum kit used this time
(older and heavily degraded) wasnt so good, therefore I needed more
mixing time to produce a decent sound from the recording.

On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

Figure 4 Two photos of the second drum session.

On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

3.2 Recording Guitars

In both sessions described above we also recorded guitars, while the
drummer was playing. Two different musicians were recorded, Valillon and
Sumcho.
To record them I used a Shure 57 in front of a Roland Cube 30x amplifier,
at one inch from the speaker.
A lot of effect pedals were used by both guitarists, a EHX Micro Q-tron
(Envelope Filter), EHX Clone Theory (Vibrato/Chrous) and EHX Stereo
Memory Man with Hazarai (Digital Delay) together with the in-built effects
of the Roland amplifier.
I didnt really asked them to play specific melodies in a specific key or
scale, I just told them to play. A very interesting (to me) and poignant
melody came out from Valillons guitar playing during the first session.
I later decided to use it as main melody for the first song of the EP.
3.3 Mixing Drums and Changing Section Durations.
Once the studio sessions were over, I listened to the recorded tracks
several times in my home studio and decided which parts to add to the
songs. Then I mixed separately the drum tracks to obtain the sound
I wanted from it, paying attention that it was consistent with other
rhythmic sounds of each song.
I spent several hours on it, since often electronic and acoustic rhythms
are present at the same time on this record.
Finally, I found some interesting drum sections, longer than a specific
sections duration we had though for the song, so I ended up changing the
duration of some song sections and, in some cases, giving the drums more
prominence or even assigning to them the leading role. This has meant that
we had to re-arrange those sections later.

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On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

3.4 Recapitulating
Two studio session, of about 10 hours each, were spent to record
additional drums and guitars for this record.
At the end of the studio production, we got the five songs filled with
lots of drums and some guitar. Later I decided to use some extra material
recorded in studio, which sounded great to me. Hence we had to change
the duration, or even replace some sections, of the original versions of the
songs. That caused some sections to be later re-arranged while preparing
the songs for the mix of the whole EP.
At this point we have added the following instruments:

- drums
- guitars

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4. Post-Production
This process began after the last studio session, lasting one month or so,
which was done entirely at my home studio.
The starting point were the earlier version of the songs, which were
roughly mixed in Ableton, together with the guitar and drum tracks
recorded in studio, which were mixed in Pro Tools with the stereo mix
(taken out from Ableton) of each song.
4.1 Preparing songs for the mix
At this point I had half of the work in Ableton and the other half in
Pro Tools. For each song, I initially prepared the tracks in Ableton, removing
unwanted effects used to play the song live, so to can import them into
Pro Tools.
For convenience, I will describe the process to mix a single song, since it
was similar for each of them.
Once I got all tracks into Pro Tools, I separated them into groups, i.e.
rhythm, bass, harmony, melody, and so on. Then I listened the whole song
several times, re-thinking about the structure of the song. Some sections
sounded better with drums, while others with electronic rhythm, others
with guitar, while some seemed meaningless.
So I started changing the structure of the song and discussing it with
Sumcho, sending him various redesigned versions of each song. When we
reached an agreement, I began the mix the song.

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Post-Production

4.2 Mixing, Re-arranging and Finishing Touches

I used Pro Tools 10 on a MacBook Pro to mix the EP, an Apogee Duet
sound card and a pair of Yamaha MSP5 Studio Monitors.
The mixing process started with several listening to the song, always
imagining what emotions we wanted to transmit or ambiances we wanted
to recreate and, technically speaking, fixing things werent working. Then,
for every section, I began identifying the leading actors -instruments or
sounds-, the secondary and the supporting ones. Here is where I processed
most of the tracks, assigning them to a specific place in the frequency, time
and space. At the end of this process I had, more or less, the song working.
After mixing, some rearrangements were needed, especially for those
sections that sounded poor after a few listens. In such case, Sumcho and I
rearranged these sections and immediately recorded them into Pro Tools,
listening to it again and again until we got a decent version.
To go deeper, I will explain the process of mixing one song, the third of
the EP, called Meg. Please refer to figure 5.
I started with a pre-mix of the drum tracks (grouped by the blue color), and
then I sent the whole tracks to an auxiliary track via the Bus 3-4 to process the
drum as a single instrument. The other tracks were imported from Ableton (the
last 8 tracks, comprising electronic rhythm, synthetic bass and pads), except
for the guitar track recorded in studio, the voices and additional sound tracks
(darker blue and purple tracks) recorded directly into Pro Tools. So I began
mixing the pre-mixed groups.
In particular I added delay with SoundToys Echoboy to the voice track to
give it more prominence, while leaving the other voice tracks unprocessed
since they were used as background vocals or rhythmic elements. Then I fixed
the stereo image of the bass track with Waves S1; the sound, produced by a
synthesizer, had a wide and varying stereo image. In the last part of the song I
also added a delay to bass track, since I wanted to give it more prominence. I
applied two different equalizations to differente sections of the pads track and
automated the bypass of the two Massemburg MDW5 plugins used here. I

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Post-Production

compressed and gated using the Waves C1comp-gate the drum mix. I left the
electronic rhythm tracks imported from Ableton almost unprocessed since they
were already produced samples and worked well. I only appied to them a small
compression with Waves C1 in order to control the peaks. I applied reverb with
Waves TrueVerb to the guitar track to hide it a bit farther away from the vocals
and pads plane.
As finishing touches I used three little synthesizers, which I like to
consider production tools as well as filters and effects, to add some noises,
feedback and pseudo-random glitches to some parts of the song, especially
for bridge sections, anticipating changes or to introduce a new instrument.
These special tools were:

- Korg Monotron Duo through a Korg Monotron delay

(feedback and noise)
- Standuino PI (Arduino based random digital synthesizer)

I manually compensated the delay of each track to the one with most
delay, put a limiter on the master track to prevent clipping though I had
roughly made sure the mix wouldnt exceed 5 dB. I also monitored the
master track regularly with a Paz Analyzer to check if it was covering the
desired spectrum and stereo image. So my mix was ready for mastering.

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Post-Production

Figure 5 Mix of a song in Pro Tools.

15

Post-Production

4.3 Mastering
I will describe the master processing I did for the first song of the EP, called
Boards of Tibet or simply BOT.
I decided to gear the master mainly towards internet media (MP3, AAC), but
also for CD. I wanted the song to sound vintage, dramatic, intense, pure and
loud in some parts. I also wanted the song to preserve part of its great dynamic
range.
Since I assured at least a 5 dB headroom, and even more in the softer parts,
the first thing I did was apply a small parallel compression to the entire mix,
using compressor, and set it limit () at -24dB.
Then I widened a bit the stereo image with Waves S1 to get a more
enveloping sound and MS multiband equalized and compressed with
Brainworks BX2 and XL to reinforce the low frequencies and surgically
deemphasize some harsh mid and high frequencies.
Then I sent the audio to the Kramer Master Tape (Waves MPX) plugin,
modeling a vintage tape machine, setting parameters to color the sound as
desired. I set the MPXs tape speed to High to preserve high frequency content,
set the input level until I saw the VU meter display +3dB at most, added a bit of
distorsion with the Flux parameter, a bit of Wow & Flutter.
Lastly, I maximized the overall level to -0.1 dB with Waves L2.
I used the Pro Tools 10 option to directly upload the sound to my
Soundcloud, without worrying about mastering for Mp3.

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5. Conclusions and

Acknowledgments

Building up songs starting from noises and accidental recordings has

always fascinated me, but this time I choose a different approach to
composition, starting from rhythms or harmonies. I tried to follow a typical
musical scheme to compose, structure, arrange, rearrange and choose the
elements composing the songs. The goal is to address a wider audience.
The order of the song has been chosen to give a narrative to the EP.
It begins with an austere ambient/progressive rock song and ends with a
pulsating dance-oriented one. It flows through three more songs, always
trying to balance the tension between dark atmospheres and relaxing
parts, pushing the limits of the box using noise and randomness, but
without breaking these limits.
I handled the whole process, from building up songs from scratch with
Sumcho, to final mixing and mastering of them.
I always tried to do my best during this year, and I would like to thank
all the musicians involved, especially Sumcho and Valillon, the professors
Enric i Ferran for their availability and professionalism, and Pbinni for her
pacience.

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