Time For Some Drama

Today’s big addition to Didn’t Feel Safe is some dramatic sound effects to recreate a typical argument between my parents and the sounds of muffled yelling in their bedroom. I also recorded and comped the final vocals in a studio at Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Acting Without Acting

About 7 years ago, I spent a year studying the Meisner acting technique at The Actors Pulse in Redfern. I discovered this technique after a friend recommended it to me and was drawn to it because it was all about responding authentically in the moment and not overthinking. I thought this would help me get out of my head and connect better with my emotions, which is key to success as an actor or musician.

Sanford Meisner said that:

“Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

The key to the technique is a training exercise called repetition where actors rapidly repeat spontaneous observations that bounce off each other until something changes. It’s liberating, fun, and I thought it would be perfect for creating the dramatic scene I wanted to layer into the bridge of Didn’t Feel Safe.

I wrote a few lines I remembered my parents saying during actual arguments as the basis for the script, borrowed a Zoom recorder from The Conservatorium, got together with my fellow musician friend Margot Thomas who is studying at The Actors Pulse herself now, and recorded us doing did some repetition.

While “rep” is great for generating dialogue spontaneously, the result doesn’t flow like a normal conversation. It took a lot of editing to find a sequence of dialogue that made sense. Thankfully, my parents’ nonsensical arguments were driven by intense anger and filled with childish insults, so it didn’t have to make much sense.

My parents would often fight openly and viciously in front of their children, but the weird thing was they were much better behaved in front of strangers. It’s not like they couldn’t control themselves; they just didn’t. I found their arguments terrifying and they made no attempt to acknowledge or mitigate the impact on me. They either didn’t care, were oblivious, or were just too caught up in their own childish narcissistic rage. There was a lot of yelling going on, but no real communication; just hurtful verbal barbs intended to wound their opponent. It was terrifying to be around when I was just a defenceless young boy, and this is what I wanted to portray in the dramatic scene of this song.

Mum and Dad would often slam doors in the house when they were angry, so I grabbed a door slam sound effect from freesound.org to punctuate between the part of the argument I could hear clearly and the muffled yelling of their late-night bedroom arguments behind a closed door. I could never work out what they were saying late at night, but it still disturbed me tremendously and kept me from sleeping. For this section I used an extreme low pass filter to reduce everything to muffled voices and layered all of this over the descending minor cycle of 5ths in the Bridge.

Final Take Vocals

I also recorded the final vocals using a Rode NT2A condenser microphone in studio 1024 at Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

I wanted the verse section to be centred to represent my feeling of loneliness stuck in the middle of things while growing up. For the choruses, I wanted it double tracked and wide panned with an additional quadruple tracking by singing it an octave down, to give a thick texture and a 1980’s “wall of sound” feel. Phil Spector would be proud.

I also wanted the vocals of the chorus to blend over the end of the verses, and the first chorus repetition to blend over the second, so the track required multiple vocal takes. In all I did six complete takes, plus another six of just the chorus down an octave, which I then comped using fast swipe comping to extract the final vocal audio tracks.

In the process, I discovered that despite my MIDI melody guide track, I was singing a few notes differently in some takes which sounded bad when double-tracking the takes. I fixed this by comping the rogue notes out using other takes.

Having the anthemic chorus in the high part of my vocal range not only gave a lift to the chorus, but it also meant I could sing it an octave down for doubling to thicken the vocal texture. Yet another application of Layer Cake Orchestration^TMand the principle of spectromorphology. I couldn’t do this with the verses because they were already in the low part of my vocal register, but this didn’t matter since it provided greater contrast with the chorus and emphasised the loneliness in my voice mirroring my experience in the narrative verses.

I wasn’t happy with my vocal tone in the verses though, which felt quite exposed given that it was only single tracked, so I created another comp to double track it at a lower volume to improve the tone of my voice.

The complete list of comps is:

Comp	Part	Panning	Description
A	Verses	Centre	Verses
B	Chorus 1 Left	Left	First choruses
C	Chorus 1 Right	Right	First choruses double
D	Chorus 2 Left	Left	Second choruses
E	Chorus 2 Right	Right	Second choruses double
F	Bass Chorus 1	Centre	First choruses down an octave
G	Bass Chorus 2	Centre	Second choruses down an octave
H	Verses 2	Centre	Verses double

With the comps created, I exported them to new audio tracks to add effects plugins. It was only after exporting the comps to new tracks that I could play the doubled tracks against each other and noticed the different notes. Fixing this required some back-and-forth between the fast swipe comp editor and the exported comp tracks.

I did the comping in the studio just in case I needed to re-record a part, but in the end I had enough material in the takes folder to get by without doing so. All up, the whole recording and comping process took about 6 hours. At 4pm just as I was packing up to go home, I got the Canvas email on Updated Covid restrictions saying that from 4pm today until 30 June no singing is allowed at the Con. I had got my vocals recorded just in the nick of time.

I edited the vocals and added plugins and sends to do all the usual vocal processing suspects described in Warren Huart’s Mixing Modern Pop Vocals video:

Breath removal
De-Esser
EQ
Compression
Reverb

I get nervous when recording, and this causes my vocal tone to wobble. I’m also using it as an excuse for sometimes singing flat. A little emotion is fine, but this was too much, so I dropped the Pitch Correction plugin on all the vocal tracks. While the anthemic chorus melody is C major pentatonic, the verse melody is only A minor diatonic, so I set the pitch corrector to C major. I’m not too proud to say it: I pitch correct my vocals.