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cult-of-nice

Bodies (The “hidden” track)

September 2, 2008 by Aaron
Cult Of Nice
bodies, cult of nice, third option


This is the “hidden” track on Cult Of Nice. It’s not really hidden on the CD, per se. It’s just track 12 – but there’s a 13 second delay before it starts, and it’s not listed on the liner notes on the CD. But everywhere digital, it’s just there.

I did this one all by myself πŸ™‚ – Meaning Tamara was out of town, and I did the whole thing in one night and surprised her with it. I used some outtakes of her going “sometimes silence is sexy” and did some weird feedback stuff where I set up this mic and had the speakers in the room on, and noticed it was making WEIRD feedback noises, so I recorded them!

Then I was putting together this track by myself and drinking a lot of beer. Then I sort of improv’d the poetry stuff live on the mic and such. It was very fun. I did some creative stuff that I was sort of proud of, like some tempo changes, including a sort of tempo fade, and also a sort of key change where the organ slowly morphs into a lower key. I did all that using MIDI techniques, not audio manipulation. It was neat.

Then I liked how it got all nutballs at the end and had the shaky strings going “wwwaaaahhh!!!” “brraarrwwww!!!” But my favorite thing about this track was always the bassline. It just always made me happy and sounded badass.

This one’s one to listen to all the way through because of all those strings and piano changes. It’s not a “chorus verse chorus” type of “song”. In fact I remember thinking that I was trying to write it in some sort of linear progression like classical music.

Oh that’s a trip. I never realized til just this second that standard pop music is actually circular. I never would have attributed a sort of Eastern way of doing things to an essentially Western art but there you go. Pop music is circular. Whereas classical music is linear. Not sure all classical music is linear, but some is, I guess.

Bye!



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Possibility

August 8, 2008 by Aaron
Cult Of Nice
aaron j. trumm, abortion, cult of nice, news, nquit music, possibility, spoken word, tamara nicholl-smith, third option


Possibility, by Third Option

I may have talked a little about this one before. There was a licensing company called Raw42, and I was giving them tracks to shop to TV and movies and such, and they rejected this track because it violated the rule that said no samples.

So I wrote back and said there’s absolutely no samples in here, all original. To which they replied “no no, the newscast in the beginning”

To which I replied “ALL ORIGINAL. That’s Tamara’s poem, she’s performing it, and I told her to act like a newscaster, and I telephoned the vocals so it would sound like a newscast in a weird way. Man I guess we did a good job at it!

What an awesome poem. Possibility. We definitely did this song live a bunch, and of course Tamara would slam with this poem. She got all kinds of 10s and stuff. Once in Taos she made this woman cry and give her a 10 and come up to us. A lot of times, Tamara would make women in their 40s and 50s cry and come up to her. They would do stuff like give us 20 dollars for a 7 dollar CD and say keep the change.

The rhythm on this song as I listen to it makes me feel like we were piloting a train to revolution. But I also feel like at some point, we just got off the train for no reason. Did we give up?

I remember I did some of the synth parts on this with this little toy casio thing – literally a toy, with like 30 keys or something, that was in the studio. And I have two live drum parts on here, both of which I played. The part in the beginning was my first ever playing of drums on a recording. What’s funny is, the tempo of that section gradually speeds up (on purpose, by design). So my first ever drumming on a record, I had to speed up gradually along with the track! How advanced! πŸ™‚

Another cool thing in here I may have talked about before is the “boop boop boop boop” echo things and such. They were done on the piano live. I took a mic, put it in the piano, and ran it through a bunch of guitar pedals, distortion, delay, a wah-wah pedal, stuff like that. Then I ran that through an amp and mic’d that and recorded that. I had to put that amp way in another room and it was STILL a feedback nightmare. But I ended up making this crazy stuff with that setup. Boop boop boop boop. Boop boop boop boop. Tee hee!

And of course then I also put plain live piano in there. All in all a very fun track to make.

So since we’ve been talking..why don’t you – my friend, my faithful reader, get you some free Third Option stuff by clicking here. πŸ™‚

Good talkin to ya again πŸ™‚

— Aaron

[purchase_link id=”1325″ text=”Download Cult Of Nice Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

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B-Movie

August 7, 2008 by Aaron
Cult Of Nice
aaron trumm, b-movie, cult of nice, nquit, piano, poetry, scary movie, tamara nicholl, third option


B-Movie, by Third Option

This one has more pieces of the “Cult Of Nice” essay, read by Tamara.

A thing I like about this one is I had all the drums and everything decided, and then we were mix the song and we were like “the snare drum is weak can’t we do something with that?” so I tried running it through a guitar distortion thing, and it totally changed the nature of the snare drum, which totally changed the nature of the whole thing.

I like this one. There’s something so different and badass about it, where it sort of seems like somebody else did it. But then it has this flute sound that really reminds me of the first Third Option Frosted Mini Wheats thingy.

Man. There’s this organ in here and everything. And these little pitz pluck strings. And delayed stuff. And man I used to be so creative!! πŸ™‚

I suppose I still am. Hmmm. Does creativity go away due to becomming cynical?

There’s so much shit in here. Somebody once said it stressed them out. I dunno I guess it’s supposed to in a way. Not that I ever try that stupid thing where you hate something or something is so tedious and the artist goes “you’re SUPPOSED to hate it! that was my goal!” Oh PULEASE you lying sack of arrogant.

My aunt was talking about a movie the other day with us, and she said (paraphrasing) “I guess if the director was trying to get us to feel the feeling of being in the south at that time and being so incredibly bored then they succeeded, but I just got the feeling that he didn’t notice he was making a movie”

*laughs and laughs*

Anyway enjoy being maniacally stressed by B-Movie. I think that’s the right title though. She talks about the monster creeping up through the toaster and I think it sounds sort of B-Movie ish. In fact I think I was in a very loose way emulating the sound/style of a soundtrack that I was engineering on, that the son of the owner of the studio, Steven Romano, was doing.

He was actually doing the soundtrack for Bubba Hotep, which may be a movie you heard of. I was engineering for him. It was very dense stuff. Unfortunately the movie makers went behind his back while he was working on it and paid somebody ELSE 20,000 dollars to do another score, and that’s what they used. I don’t know, maybe he took too long or something. What a rip.

Anywho, you don’t need to go behind my back or pay $20k to get you some FREE tracks from Third Option – just go HERE and get em! πŸ™‚

[purchase_link id=”1325″ text=”Download Cult Of Nice Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

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Get the CD Here

Cult Of Nice!!!

August 6, 2008 by Aaron
Cult Of Nice
aaron j. trumm, cult of nice, nquit music, piano, poetry, spoken word, tamara nicholl, techno, third option


Well. I kinda got done with Artistic Apocalypse.

So I think I’ll move on to some Third Option.

So here is the title track/opening track to the Third Option album Cult Of Nice which me and Tamara (Nicholl) worked on at Rock Romano’s Red Shack in Houston.

The album is based on this essay that Tamara wrote in college about dark heroes and the cult of “nice”. It’s really an incredible piece of work, I think (the essay). There’s actually clips of her reading the essay in the album, in this track, in fact. She’s doing a poem called “Airborne” in the beginning. Then she reads from the essay. “we have cast what we have named as dark aside”

I love the end of the Airborne poem, when she goes “soon, we will not be accustomed, to Earth”, and the beat rips back in. FUCK that’s cool.

This song kicks ass I think. I like it. This is one of those songs that people have heard and said “why aren’t you famous” to which I replied, “because it doesn’t work like that” or “i dunno why don’t you go spread the word?” or something.

It seems like I’ve talked about the intro somewhere before. I left this space on the tape and improv’d the intro, knowing that I would have to stop sooner or later when the beat, which was already on tape, came in. My buddy Larry Lines was engineering, and we rolled, and I did the thing, first take. And I somehow knew exactly where to lay my last chord so that the beat came in perfect. No we did not slide that around or edit that. I just happened to land it perfectly the first time.

I came in to listen and we heard that and Larry got all excited and punched me right in the arm. Fuckin A!, he was saying! We loved it!!

Hey – thanks for reading this as always – feel free, my friends, to go get some FREE THIRD OPTION STUFF right HERE! πŸ™‚

— Aaron

[purchase_link id=”1325″ text=”Download CUlt Of Nice Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

iTunes US

Get the CD Here

Procedure for recording Third Option “Cult Of Nice” CD

November 10, 2006 by Aaron
Recording Procedures
cult of nice, recording

Basic Setup:

  • Initial Recording Format: 24 Track ADAT
  • Mix Destination Format: DAT/CD
  • Final Format: CD Master and Duplicated CD’s
  • Mixer: Mackie 32×8
  • Outboard Processing: Lexicon Reverbs, Art SGE Mach II Efx, 1178 compressor, Furman compressors, DBX Compressors, Alesis Quadraverbs, Zoom vocal efx
  • Synths: Alesis S4, Yamaha TG100, Boss DR660, Ensoniq Mirage, ASR-10, Casio CT770, somebody’s toy 20 key Casio
  • Mics: AKG Tube 414, Groove Tubes, AKG 414s, , Shure 55SH (50’s style mic), SM57s, SM58s, 757s, AKG D1000E
  • Mastering: TC Electronics Finalizer, Alesis Masterlink
Procedure:
  • Tracking: This project was way more straight forward than previous projects. Songs were written and arranged using Cakewalk in my NQuit studio, and synth tracks were tracked to Darwin through the Art Tube Preamp, sync’d to the sequencer with MIDI Time Code. Then, we’d take the Darwin to Rock Romano’s Red Shack and sync the Darwin to the ADAT chain there, and track live grand piano, live drums and vocals.The piano in Woman’s Poem was tracked in Albuquerque, at Washburn Piano. I called the NM Symphony and asked if they had a way to record pianos, and a guy came out with a couple of pretty good mics and we recorded it straight to Darwin. I had a mix set up on two tracks to listen to in headphones and voila.Some pianos were recorded at the Red Shack straight to Darwin as well. These were some of the ones where I was engineering and playing and was by myself, and didn’t have time to run back and forth between the control room and the piano (although I did do some of that). The intro piano on track 1, “Cult Of Nice”, was strange, because it plays for about a minute or two wild (no sync or click track or anything) and then links up with the beat when the beat comes in. I kind of just practiced a couple times, working out an arrangement that would be the right length (unless played at some WILDLY different speed than usual), and had to just sort of feel the beat come in and lock to it on the fly. Everyone in the session was very excited when, on take 1 of actual recording, it happened, it worked, and I did it! I got punched in the arm in excitement. It was great.

    On The People United, the vocal snippets “go on go on” and “the people united will never be defeated” were samples from Possibility. I used ASR-10 to sample and then loop them, playing them back at a slightly higher pitch than original.

    Bodies, which is the “hidden” track (actually it just hides because it has no liner notes mentioning it) was tracked all at the NQuit studio to Darwin, whilst drunk. All the vocals are improvised straight to tape.

    On Possibility, the crowd chanting “the people united can never be defeated” is about 30 of me, voice varied and submixed, and about 10 versions of Tamara and a friend Rebecca doing the chant along with mine. Eventually they were all submixed into a stereo pair (or actually, maybe even one track – wow) for mixdown. Everyone kept saying we needed to bring more people in, but it wasn’t necessary. The drums in the intro section are live drums. This was the first ever time I’d even attempted to play live drums on a track, and only the 2nd or 3rd time I’d even touched a kit. I didn’t come out virtuoso, but I pretty much got what I wanted. The track has a 3/4 section, then in the build up is 4/4 and speeds up, which I used tempo changes in cakewalk for, and had to follow along with the drums. Later I ran those drums through a pitch shifter, making them lower and fatter and weirder.

    Also on Possibility, a lot of the sounds that sound like maybe techno sounds are actually real piano. For example, when the beat comes in the last time (which incidentally adds two live drum tracks that I played, and then cut up and added a delay to complicate the rhythm), and there’s a “boop (boop boop boop)”, that’s piano. For this song I did some playing with taking a Shure 57 and putting down deep in the middle sound hole of the piano, then running it straight through three guitar pedals, out to a guitar amp, micing the amp. The pedals were Boss pedals; a stereo delay, a distortion, another overdrive of some kind, if I remember correctly, and a wah-wah pedal. I had the pedals next to the regular piano pedals so I could use them and the sustain pedal and what not. It was really cool, the only big problem was that even sticking the amp in the closet across the room and closing the door, I was always tetering on the brink of extreme feedback. I could barely use the overdrive or it would go nuts.

    Another thing fun about Possibility was the eery sort of synth stuff in the beginning, plus the “vroom” synth build up, much of that was done with this tiny little toy Casio which for some reason had pitch and mod wheels, but was a toy and a HALF. It was one of these things with like 20 keys that’s about a foot and a half long, that you give to a kid. But it had this cool thing it would do, so we used it.

  • Mixing: Mixdown happened via ADAT, sometimes with Darwin in the chain, and the Mackie 32×8. Straight forward, multitrack mixing, using inserts for compression, efx, etc. On Ash, I first took a bunch of vocal tracks of the poem, all recorded at different times, from DAT and put them on an ADAT tape, and submixed them to a stereo pair, fading them in and out manually while it recorded, to get the effect of one poem starting, then fading away, then another version coming in but not in the expected place in the poem, sometimes even going backwards in the poem. I think eventually, you get the whole poem. Fades and little EQ or efx changes were done on the fly manually. In some cases it would take a bit of rehearsal, and I even got Tamara to help with a couple that I didn’t have enough hands for πŸ™‚
  • Mastering/Editing: Mastering was straight forward. Finalizer out to DAT and CDR. Most tracks I did a sort of mastering/mix version where I ran through the Finalizer and tweaked the sound right at mixdown, but then also did a version with no Finalizer. Whether I ended up using the mix/master version or remastering the “raw” version varied from track to track. I edited using an Alesis Masterlink, which burned the Red Book CD master.
  • Notes:

    Tamara was very hard to record. She was relatively new to the studio and her voice would just POP up for one word and give these incredible spikes. Also, the AKG Tube mic, while great for most people’s vocals, was WAY to tinny and sibilant for her. We used various other mics, like the regular 414 or the SH55 50’s style mic that we would use live, or even the groove tubes. At that time, there was a broken Neumann U47 in the studio – how sad! Also, oh dumb of dumb, it took me awhile to realize there was were Urei 1176 and 1178 compressors in the studio, so most vocal compression was done with the DBX compressors, which I liked, but not like the 1176. Oh well.

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