»Shake the Room

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Like many good ideas, the idea came to me whilst having a bath. It's nice when pretty much an entire idea for a song comes all at once, even if it is a Lazytron version of a Will Smith song. So after the bath I thought it would be a good idea to write down my idea before I forgot it. It's worth pointing out that I went to bed after writing the note. Yeah, look at the time. I don't usually plan out my songs like this, it's usually just a vague idea to cover a particular song, or style, or to record something in a particular way. Here is the note in its entirety for you to read. You may find it interesting to look at some of the ideas which didn't make it into the actual recording.

06:42 05/12/2011

'Shake the room'

full-on industrial electro pop version of the will smith classic.

reference 'viagra culture' and 'me so horny' revco cover wherever necessary.

guitar riff, similar to outro to 'the metal' and the hanneman riff in 'jihad'. add harmony part for extra slayer references.

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unsyncopated vocals with monotone delivery. possibly use vocoder.

'a meditation on the paranoia and casual misogny of the male psyche.'

use left/right stereo vocals to do the stuttering section, so left is on the beat 'so why don't you chill (chill) chill (chill)...' use a centred vocal line to add power to both sides.

start song with simple two bar quaver fill on hi-hat.

harsh drum sound. use the tr kit. get a big reverby snare sound. try doubling up the snare on another track to achieve this.

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straight rock beat during the chorus and probably the verse as well. try using the same beat for both. cut back to the hihat intro for the 'i came here tonight to hear the crowd go' line. 'viagra culture' beat may work for an outro.

add explosion samples for 'boom' line.

'like many good ideas. the idea came to me whilst having a bath. it's nice when pretty much an entire idea for a song comes all at once, even if it is a lazytron version of a will smith song.'

The song was an opportunity to test out my fancy new drum machine that I picked up from a fantastic second hand shop in Leeds. The place is a proper Aladdin's cave, it's also where I picked up my SM57 from. The new machine is a Boss DR-202, or Doctor Groove (not merely a doctor of rhythm, this one can groove.) It's a generation or two older than the DR-3 and is much more dance and hip-hop oriented. It's quite a bit harder to use and lacks a few features like support for unusual time signatures but it makes up for this by having many more higher quality samples than the DR-3 as well as pots that let you tweak the cutoff, resonance and sustain of individual samples like on a synthesiser.

The song mode isn't anywhere near as straightforward as the DR-3 and there isn't particularly good native support for fills etc. so I had to finally bite the bullet and try to use Fruityloops as a MIDI controller. After a great deal of fussing around, I finally got this to work and programming all the drum patterns was satisfyingly straightforward. The DR-202 let me tweak the sound of the snare and add reverb to get that industrial sound which the whole song pretty much depends on.

There is a demo which was mixed down after the main recording session, there weren't any proper vocals in the loud bits and there was a lack of samples, the guitars also sounded pretty crap. During the second session I re-did the spoken vocals, added an extra vocoder part and re-did the guitars with a better sound on the Pod.

I made an effort on this song to limit the number of tracks that I used during recording. The initial recording was basically kept to just 8 tracks. The following session brought this up to 12, and after adding a few samples, finally 14. I probably rely way too much on the availability of tracks when recording on PC, so I thought it would be a good exercise to try and keep them to a limit.

There is a whole bunch of samples in this song. The 'Sieg Heil' is from a clip of a Hitler speech on Youtube (will that hurt my chances of radio play time?) There are several samples from Arnie classic, The Running Man--'Yes!', 'Who loves you, and who do you love? One more time!', 'Get me out of here guys!' Finally, that's Rebecca Linares you can hear screaming.

The heavy guitar part is ripped off from Raining Blood. Before I forget, the Pod settings for it were probably (I'm writing this nearly two weeks after doing the recording) the Mesa Boogie amp model with the usual bass down, mids and treble up settings. It was most likely going through one of the 2x10 or 2x12 cabs, possibly the Line 6 one, or one of the Fender ones, whichever sounded like it had the extra bite. Despite how feeble the noise gate on the Pod is, I'm pretty sure I didn't use the ME-50 for any additional signal processing crap.

The thumbnail is one of the super 80's dancers from The Running Man. I want that dance sequence performed at my funeral before my jet-propelled coffin is fired down a metal tube deep into the 'zone' where I will be protected by biker gangs whilst I plan my next move.

This makes an appearance on the Tetsuo: Burrito Man soundtrack.