3. Neils Children, Trust You. Emerging from the cave the Horrors once came from, this Cheshunt via Southend psych-beat band have had a tumultuous run with band members leaving, scrapped albums and even taking an indefinite hiatus right after touring for the release of their first album X.Enc. Despite having their singer featured in the 2005 NME cool list and ranking their single Always The Same at number 56 on the UK charts list, the band never really took off and eventually ceased all activities in 2009. Its only after their 2012 reunion that original members John Linger and Brandon Jacobs locked themselves and came up with this gem of an album, Dimly Lit, going further along the path of psychedelic music they used to share with Farris Badwan and his band. Trust You, taken from this album shows that sometimes a beat can reinvent the wheel. Songwriting Kudos : Psych beat music can be a gift and a curse. Its usually regarded by non-connoisseur as boring repetitive echo-filled jams, mostly revolving around themes directly ripped off Tomorrow Never Knows and it is a mystery to them as to why all those bands have different members when they ultimately all sound the same. But the great strength of the genre is that its simplicity makes it so easy to adapt and evolve all while remaining itself. This song is pretty predictable with its easy structure and lack of evolution chord-wise, but its the main 10/8 (4/4 + 1/4) beat that gives it its unique taste. The almost chromatic vocal line and the constant bass line help keep track of the strange rhythmic patterns the guitar and drums are playing. The simple arrangement help make all elements discernible while the rhythm aspect creates a feel of dizziness. This ultimately helps the song achieve one ultimate goal of all psych music : loosing you in the music. When polyrhythms are unleashed on you, especially for non musicians, your brain tends to follow what it can predict, be it main pulse, easy melodies or repetitive patterns. In this song when the Chorus hits (How soon x 5-) the drums and guitar seem so all over the place that you end up concentrating on the main vocals and its over-easy ascending melody, like somehow is holding you by the hand when walking through and unknown place. Now we could be analyzing all the patterns of each instruments and see how they fit with each other but the main purpose of this blog isnt to transcript actual music but rather extract the general idea and give you tips to try it in your own music. Tip : With the help of a sequencer, make a simple beat in 8/8, much like the one in the previous entry. Kick on the 1-5 eighth notes, snares on the 3-7 eighth notes and add a high hat on every eighth note. Now, lets add two more eighth note at the end of the measure before coming back to the first, for a total of ten eighth-notes. Add the high hats on those two and add a snare on the 9 and a kick on the 10. Congrats, youve just made a 10/8 beat, that was easy wasnt it? Now the hard part, try and put a bass line on it that goes all throughout the measure. Then add guitar chords and see where they fit best. Is there a new pulse coming from all of that? Maybe your vocal line should use this pulse as a basic rhythm while you figure out the melody? Remember that a good arrangement is made of several simple lines that interact well with each other. If your drum part is a clusterf*ck, adding other rhythmic patterns will only add to the mess. Its tempting to write overly-complicated parts, but when you add something to one instrument you gotta take back from another a.k.a If you gonna build a wall, you gonna make the first layers really straight and plain, and not make crazy round-shaped bricks and try raise a wall on top of it. You can make 3 instruments sound fairly complicated while having them only play really simple things, if one of them takes more space then you should simplify the other to give them less importance, then you can use this as a tool to change the prominence of instruments in your song during each parts before you even have to reach for that volume knob or tell the engineer to mix your instrument louder when no one is looking!
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 10:44:00 +0000
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