Hissy Fit is the name Word’s spellchecker suggests for the name of the person who runs this blog. Click on the About This Blog/Matthew Hiscock link at the top for more. Berry is on the Parc Avenue EP.
1. How’d you come up with the name of the track?
I think it was because I’d used the French spelling of Park Avenue here in Montreal for the other track on the EP that I had to use the English spelling of Berri Street for this one. Berri and Park are on either side of the old English-French dividing line of Montreal, which is blvd. St. Laurent, or St. Lawrence Blvd. Montreallers know what I mean.
2. How long did it take to create?
Probably 15 hours total.
3. Were you sober?
As usual.
4. Was there a separate recording/mixing?
Nope. Pretty much as you go, with the arrangement coming by putting all tracks in infinite loop and pressing play and just unmuting and muting stuff in real time, then tweaking that.
5. Did you master it?
More or less: UAD-1 1176, VERY minor EQ, limiting. Nothing fancy.
6. What sequencer did you use?
Logic.
7. How’d you make the bass?
Again, my homebrew analog synth. I put three oscillators through a slightly resonant 24dB/oct lowpass filter with nothing modulating the filter frequency except, perhaps, keyboard tracking. Because 3 oscillators isn’t a lot, the waveforms phased in and out a lot, making the volume vary, so I had to compress it with a UAD-1 1176 just to keep it reasonably level. It still wavers a little, which adds character, I think. Then I wanted the kick to duck the level, so I put Logic’s standard compressor on after that and side-chained it to the kick. It’s still strange to use two compressors on one track when I hardly use compression on anything other than the mix bus.
8. Any essential plug-ins or FX?
For FX: Logic’s Tape Delay, which is all over the track, plus Space Designer.
For instruments: EXS24, which is responsible for all drum and percussion sounds, plus the vocal samples. One annoying thing about the EXS24 – you can’t select to optimize your sounds within it – instead you have to trim it manually, which can mess up your samples’ start times. Also the relationship between audio in the Bin and audio stored in samplers seems a bit confused, especially if you drag something from the Bin to the sampler, then delete it from the Bin. A minor complaint, though.
9. Did you use hardware? If so, what bits?
The homebrew synth above. Also, I’m using a 01x, which is pretty important to my setup. Other than that, nothing. Everyone should have hardware.
10. Did you play in your parts or draw them in?
I play them in and heavily tweak them. The vocal sample took a fair amount of tweaking. I usually, and in this case especially, put too many notes in and have to chisel away to make room. Here the vocal was really busy and I chopped away probably 75% of it.
11. Did you record any acoustic instruments? If so, which ones, and what was your setup?
Not this time. The vocal is an acoustic instrument but I didn’t record that.
12. What are you most proud of?
That vocal. I think it turned out pretty well considering how little I used. I guess that’s the power of delay and reverb. Also, the synth organ part’s got that late-night-sweaty-club thing going on.
13. If there are things you dislike (you’re not obligated to mention them) do people notice?
For some people, 140 is a bit fast, though it does sound decent pitched down.
Bonus Question: Is there anything else you think readers will find interesting?
I used only ten tracks on this one: 2 kicks (layered), 2 claps, hats, percussion, bass, synths and two chopped up vocal tracks. Most of them just have one plug-in – a highpass UAD-1 EQ. The most plugs on a single channel is 3, on the bass. I’m not one for using loads of plugs. Didn’t use any of the sends, besides to do the side-chaining. People that use 72 tracks to make a tune are really making their lives unnecessarily difficult, imo.
Great track!