New Monday #53
Happy Monday!
Get the headphones out and put them on for this one....
00:00 Great electric guitar sound. It’s in mono with a slapback feeding into a reverb.
00:05 Two acoustic guitars spread out. Two different performances. Right seems to have different voicing, or tuning? Same three chords for the whole song.
00:10 Drums are mono, played with brushes. A lot of mono. The whole thing seems mono with stereo ambience. A technical limitation or an artistic decision? Both?
00:15 Bass is down the center, mono again, and really tight on that kick.
00:20 Electric guitar again. The reverb blooms out into stereo, mainly on the ending notes of phrases. Someone is riding the reverb return on this. SM-57 on a Fender Deluxe, I think?
00:35 Lovely lead vocal. Man, someone is close up on that mic!
00:40 Keyboard drone in there? Following the chords? Low-pitched?
00:50 This will sort of wreck it for you... the drums and low-end sound very different whenever the lead vocal comes in. When it’s out, the snare/hi hat hit has a “ch” sound to it. When the vocal comes in there’s a volume jump and a tone change — sounds more like a “SHHH” and the bottom gets a little warmer. Will explain...
01:10 Some background mumblers... all I catch is the last word, “heart.” Appropriate.
01:45 Lead vocal. Maybe an echo on it, but a warm reverb sound, and again, someone is riding it.
01:55 You can really hear the drum sound and bottom change whenever the vocal comes. I’m guessing because the vocal is sung so quietly that it’s pushed up in the mix. Then, when the singer is louder, the change in the drums is less because the vocal track is pulled down a bit.
02:32 Ouch! The end of the vocal line, “With you,” is way out of tune! No pitch correction here! Not surprising. Very hard to hold pitch when one is barely using any breath.
02:36 This guitar part... it’s great. James Calvin Wilsey played it. Strat with a whammy bar. He died in 2018 at my age, another victim of addiction.
03:24 That whispery vocal part sounds like, “This world is only gonna break your heart."
04:17 Oh jeez... an impossibly long held note, and this is 1989. How did they do this??? I think it fades into a keyboard part, or maybe they sampled and looped a section.
04:36 FINALLY the lock-step of the tempo breaks and the time loosens up — a rough harmony (the ghostly background voices) on top of the lead vocal, and then the ending, the guitars do an offset arpeggiated part. Now I think the left side guitar is in a different tuning.
Great song. Made his career.
Last Friday was Valentine's Day, so I was thinking about the greatest love song ever, or really, what even IS a love song? It was much easier to find the sexiest love song ever, which has to be Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. And if it’s not the sexiest song, it sure is the sexiest video ever. After seeing it, one dreams of beaches in black and white for weeks. And Helena Christensen.
Chris Isaak was a San Francisco Bay area, neo-rockabilly performer, with his band Silvertone. Filmmaker David Lynch featured the song in his movie, Wild at Heart, which gave the song a tremendous boost, launching Chris Isaak onto MTV and international radio.
Isaak wrote the song, and he and his production team, producer Erik Jacobsen and engineer Mark Needham, recorded it a number of times but no one was happy with it. In the end, Needham sampled parts of it and flew them to 24 track 2” using an AKAI DD1000 sampler. The AKAI was a monster of the time, capable of cutting up samples into smaller pieces, turning things into playlists, etc. That combined with a MIDI sequencer made it into a primitive sort of DAW, and Needham made tremendous use of it. Most of Wicked Game is an assemblage of samples — the drums, the bass, the backing vocals, even that wonderful guitar part — all snipped and restitched using the AKAI.
One of the acoustic guitar parts is standard tuned, the other is “Nashville Tuned,” which is when you take a 12-string guitar and remove all the low strings of each pair of strings to leave a guitar that’s effectively an octave higher with some oddness to it. Of course, no one semi-decapitates a 12-string to do this. More commonly, you get a wreck around acoustic and swap the lower strings out. At first, I thought the Nashville Tuned guitar was panned right, but the ending makes me think it’s panned left.
That wonderful vocal was cut live in the studio without headphones, which explains why the drums sound so different whenever the vocals come: phase shifts and tonal changes caused by the leakage — more on this further down.
Producer Eric Jacobsen did a lot more than Chris Isaak. Starting in the early 60s, he worked with the Lovin’ Spoonfuls, Time Hardin and... Norman Greenbaum! Yes, Eric Jacobsen produced both Wicked Games and Spirit in the Sky!
Mark Needham has worked on a ton of great records as well, ranging from Dolly Parton to Lindsey Buckingham (and Fleetwood Mac), The Killers, Imagine Dragons, P¡NK...
The video, incidentally, is iconic, inspiring much emulation...
Cutting Vocals Without Headphones
I have years of experience doing this. And out of love for you all, I wrote a whole big thing about it, covering every technique I know, including cutting a reversed-phase leakage track. If you hate headphones like I hate headphones, you’ll LOVE this technique.
New Monday is now a year old. I am experimenting with different logos and designs. Let me know if you like or hate one in particular.
Warm regards,
Luke