“Life in a Northern Town”
Such a great song, I think I pick up on new things every time I listen to it. My plan with this was to make something that felt more like an intimate chamber music version, rather than the expansiveness of the original, but I just kept working at it 😬. There are a ton of musical ideas going on in the original and I felt like I needed to strip it down and then layer elements back in slowly. This meant losing some of the signature elements like the vocal chant on the chorus, but it just didn’t seem to fit. I started with just piano for the chords and a theremin for the melody which was haunting. To offset the theremin, I liked using a harp to add some of the classical percussive vibe from the original. The other piece that I wanted to reference was the big dynamic changes from the verse to the chorus, so I recorded some real drums and tambourine to accent that shift.
Tonally, I wanted to take many of the textures and layers from the original song and use them in new ways or reference them with different instruments. For some of the more ethereal tones I used a Rhodes piano sound, doubled with some layers of piano with space-y reverb. Getting the theremin to sound “real” took a lot of subtle shifts in volume. There is an underlying organ beat in the original that comes in after the first chorus, I love that so brought that using a Hammond Auto Rhythm unit sampled from a YouTube demo. This was fun as I had to beat match and fix some of the irregularities to make the loop. Being new to digital recording, figuring out how to mix midi tracks, samples and elements recorded practically is tough, but an exciting change from trying to record everything practically. I’ve learned a lot from videos like this: https://youtu.be/PioeeX5LjGY
Soft Synths / Midi Instruments
Recorded in GarageBand
Voltage Modular - Theremin
Rhodes Mark IV, Hammond B3 for Bass
Harp, Shaker, Piano - Garageband
Drums - Mix of live and Sampled Hammond Auto Rhythm beats from YouTube
Effects
Vallhalla Supermassive (Free!)
To add warmth to some of the midi stuff, I used a few compressors, distortion plugins and tube amps from this list: https://blog.landr.com/8-free-vst-plugins-warm-sound/
-Barrett Haroldson
