Two Tracks I Have Produced: Part 2 - "Entalonus Will Rise"
Fraser Macintosh
Nov 27, 2019
5 min read
Following on from my previous blog post about my original song “AME”, today I’ll be talking about the second track that I produced and it’s called “Entalonus Will Rise”.
Aside from having an incredibly pretentious title, this track is I think best described as a stoner/grunge combo with influences from bands like Corrosion of Conformity, Orange Goblin, Alice In Chains and Kyuss. With this in mind, my goal for Entalonus was to create a retro soundscape which harkens back to the alternative and hard rock sounds of the 90s and early 2000s.
Drums
Contrastingly to AME, I recorded live acoustic drums for Entalonus courtesy of my good friend and bandmate Robbie Nicol (I’ll link to his pages here and here, he’s got some really cool stuff so I recommend checking it out) and as such the drum sound for Entalonus took up a comparatively larger part of the production flow than that of AME.
I essentially used three phases of editing for the kit; EQ, compression and reverb, and used each of these phases to particularly focus on a different part of the kit.
Phase 1: EQ – I wanted to use EQ in this track to beef out and add substance to the raw drum sound. Specifically, I focussed on making the kick, and to some extend the snare, really punch through mainly by boosting the high frequencies for both. In heavy music, the kick drum is essential to providing that driving rhythm and a lack of impact in this area of the kit can make a mix feel as though it doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so for me it’s very important that the kick be prominent.
Phase 2: Compression – In a Sound on Sound article, producer and engineer Rich Costey talks about how he often compresses parts of the kit individually which is a long-winded approach but it means that you can tailor your compressor settings to best fit the intricacies of the different parts of the kit. Then you can blend your compressed tracks back in with your original, uncompressed tracks to get a nice mix of both processed and raw sounds. For me, drum compression is all about bringing the sound of the kit to life and I wanted to focus on giving the snare a good crack to it and making the toms sound big and bold.
For the snare examples, I've automated the compressed track to only play during the 2nd, 4th and 6th snare hits so it is easier to hear the difference.
Phase 3: Reverb – My main aim for the reverb stage was to bolster the organic, live feel of the drums and, along with the use of high-pass filters in the compression stage, create shine and shimmer in the overheads. I often like to think of the cymbals as looming above the rest of the mix and I like to use them to create a swirling atmosphere for everything else to exist within. So, I went with a long and open reverb on the overhead tracks to allow the cymbals to provide that ambience of being in the air of track. This is similar to how Kyuss used cymbals to give the impression of a dark cloud loitering overhead with the heavy instrumentation jamming underneath.
With respect to the track as a whole, I set up a subtle reverb on the stereo out to support the live feel I was looking for. I wanted to emphasize that even though each set of tracks have their own effects and distinct sounds, at the end of day, they still exist in the same space and the master verb helps everything feel connected I think.
Bass Effects
I knew straight after recording it in that I wanted to make the bass mini solo stand out a bit more with a wah effect, but I found that Logic’s virtual wah pedal made the bass tone too thin for my taste. Thus, I turned to probably my favourite modulation pedal on Logic’s pedalboard plug-in, the spin box organ simulator, to add warmth, soften the tone and to add an extra layer of interest to the bass sound.
I also added a flanger effect to the bass at the start of the outro as I thought that the overtones it provided would fit well with the warm but solitary guitar part in this section. I then added some bass fuzz during the second part of the outro to make the bass sound angsty and grungy. I really liked the contrast here between the high, elegant triadic guitar part and the dirty, gritty drive given by the light fuzz.
In the Sound on Sound article that I mentioned earlier, Rich Costey also stresses the importance of a song’s intro in setting up the vibe and feel of a track. Here he is mainly talking from technical, mixing point of view but it did get me thinking about how to structurally make the most of an intro from a songwriter’s point of view. Refer to this snippet. As with the section in the blog about AME, I recommend listening to the snippet simultaneously with reading the following section.
Entalonus starts with an edgy, fast paced 7/8 riff which I think is good because immediately we’ve got something that’s a little bit different and unorthodox. A lot of the time our brains can get used to hearing stuff in 4/4, which perhaps means that we take more notice of something that’s not in that regular metre. So, my aim here was to try and grab the listener’s attention by starting with a part that is both brash and abrasive tonally as well as rhythmically unusual.
Then the song moves on to its main riff which continues the heavy, driving tone set up by the intro but the feel is more open and grooving as opposed to the intro which is quite frantic. Here, I was trying to achieve a happy balance between familiarly and progression in these opening sections by having some tonal aspects remain consistent throughout while substituting in a vastly different groove.
After two iterations of the main riff, guitar harmonies come in, with delay to achieve a soaring effect, to provide something extra to aurally pick up on and make the song feel like its developing. I think that this keeps two more iterations of the main riff from getting too stale.
Thanks so much again to those who’ve read my blogs and listened to my music, I sincerely hope that it’s been a somewhat enjoyable experience.
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