Demo Track: (E)motion Violation

Many years ago, I had a band/project with an ambitious, excitable young man named Matthew Schultz. As my long-time readers will recall, Matt died this summer. (See my post about it here.)

I mentioned the one and only full studio-produced vocal demo we recorded, a song called "(E)motion Violation". I had written it about a year before, and we were making plans to record a full EP, when circumstances led us down two different paths in life.

I present to you, for your listening pleasure (hopefully), that rough demo. You can download or listen to it here.

Listen to it, share it, but please leave the authorship (in the ID3 tag) intact. I retain all rights to the track, so if you want to use it in your project, let me know. I'm sure we can work something out.


How It Was Made
The song was composed on an Amiga 500 (with a whopping 1 MB of RAM, and two floppy disk drives!) Most of the main instrumentation is done with samples.

The guitar is a single sampled powerchord recorded through the headphone out jack of a Gorilla Tube Cruncher amp with the gain cranked up. The tone is also helped by the 8-bit sampling on the Amiga, since it dirtied up the tone that much more. That one powerchord was then played as a sample up and down, to make the main guitar riffs.

Drums were played through a Yamaha RY-30 Drum Machine (the best machine on the planet!)

The bass synth line was originally done on a Casio CZ-101, but since it was having power problems when we went into the studio, we used a nice synth that was resident in Pumpkin Shell Studio. All that we really needed was a deep growling bass line, and it was perfect.

Everything was controlled by the Amiga running MED 3.20 at 16 tracks. For those unfamiliar with the Amiga, there were 4 sampled audio channels, 2 left, 2 right. To achieve the studio mix, we ran it though about a dozen times, recording one voice at a time. We were able to slave the Amiga to the studio controller, so we could keep the multiple takes in sync. It was in the mix that we were able to take the mono voices from the Amiga and pull them out as stereo tracks, which helped fill it out considerably.

Once we had the instrumentation laid down, Matt tried a few vocal takes before he hit on the right sound for the lead vocals. (If you listen carefully during the chorus, my own vocals are hiding in the background behind Matt's. I had a little different cadence to my vocals, so it provided a nice thickness to the chorus. Not quite gang vocals, but just a hint of extra grit.)

The recording engineer & producer on this track was Richard Schultz, then proprietor of Pumpkin Shell Studio (Matt's older brother). The whole studio experience was wonderful and Rick has always been more focused on music as a creative art form than as a business. In addition to being the producer/engineer on this track, Rich is one of my favorite indie musicians. (Shameless plug: Rick's web site is at: http://richardschultzmusic.com)

Since the questions always gets raised: where did the samples come from? "Official" and "Model" were word samples from George Carlin. The two "Fear" quotes were from some talk show around 1990 (probably The Jerry Springer Show), from a guest who was attacking the polygamist way of life. The laugh was, I believe, from a Man-O-War track. (Matt found that one.)

Lessons I Learned From This Demo
A huge lesson I have learned, in retrospect, is how big the song sounds, yet the gear that it was created on is an absolute laugh by today's standards. We had so little room to expand, we had to be more creative and inventive in how we achieved the sound we wanted. Now, in this world of infinitely multi-tracked DAWs, it is easy to get lost in the sea of options and spend more time playing with the song than actually creating it.

Food for thought: Each and every one of us has, sitting in front of us, more audio technology than was used to produce the entire catalog of the Beatles. Yet so many home studios are used as little more than beat boxes and loop machines. Before you're tempted to dial up a preset on a VST to be your lead voice, try making a sample that is more uniquely YOUR sound. It's one way to stand out. That's what I was doing with this song back in the day. The sampled guitar, played within the tracker was unlike most of what was expected in that day and age ('91 or '92).

Drop me a line and let me know what you think of the track. What do you think works? What doesn't work for you? I can take criticism, as long as it's constructive.

Read the full post here!