Acting on ‘Impulse’ - Subwayterranean Homesick Blues
I’ve had a couple of interesting jobs so far this month.
Probably the most unusual work I’ve undertaken this month has been writing 2 jingles for an American radio station.
This station is one of the many Jack FM stations (http://www.jack.fm/) which dispense with a DJ and a music policy and instead play songs from all eras seemingly randomly. Listening to Jack FM is meant to sound like playing your iPod on shuffle. As I’ve been typing this I’ve seen ‘Vertigo’ by U2 followed by ‘Electric Avenue’ by Eddy Grant!
The jingles for this station reflect the mixed musical policy - one had to sound like Bob Dylan playing as one man band in a subway, the other needed to sound like a 1950s Elvis track. Both need to be at most 10 seconds in length, and most interestingly, both require a suitable edit point somewhere near the middle where they can be spliced and mixed and matched with other jingles of different styles (they already have Ragtime, 80s Metal and Monk style chanting jingles)
The 1950s style cut was reasonably straightforward musically and production wise, however the one-man-band style jingle allowed a little more room for play.
The sonic characteristics of a one-man-band for me are; kick drum and cymbal (maybe slightly loose timing), a stringed instrument such as a guitar or banjo for the main harmonic content, a voice and a harmonica or kazoo for some melodic embellishment. Occasionally a tambourine or bells may be involved.
As entertaining as a banjo/kazoo double header may be, it wouldn’t have sounded very ‘Dylan’, so I plumped for the acoustic guitar and harmonica option.
Chordally I chose simple chords in the key of G major as this seems a common key for a lot of folk, country etc.
With the sounds I tried to find a boomy drum sound and a pair of ’splashy’ cymbals which I could alternate between to make it sound less sequenced. Some subtle volume and timing manipulation ensured that the beat was in time but not perfect/robotic.
I recorded the acoustic guitar with a mic in a vocal booth to ensure a dry yet natural signal. A local harmonica player was drafted in to perform some bluesy style licks and was again recorded in a vocal booth.
The greatest challenge was to create a feeling of the one-man-band being played in a subway without losing clarity. I decided that the use of a convolution reverb would provide the most natural sounding impression of space so i found a suitable impulse file from many of the free resources online and loaded that into the reverb plug-in. I also experimented with a delay using short delay times and a very low feedback time. Although this sounded quite realistic, it damaged the clarity of the overall composition so I decided to only use reverb.
Anyhow the jingle was emailed back to America where it will have the vocals recorded - I’m looking forward to hearing the results, and the final version on air.
If any of you haven’t tried Convolution Reverb yet you can download a free VST plugin here;
http://www.knufinke.de/sir/index_en.html
On the links page of that site there are links to sites that offer free impulse files.
Give it a go!