Tread
Production Notes
Tread was my first attempt at an electronic song, and I'm pretty pleased with it. I listened to Radiohead and Thom Yorke's Eraser album for six months or so while I was doing this. In any event, that's why it has that sort of sound (at least hopefully, that was my intention). Actually, initially, it was supposed to be a cover of a song called "snow" that one of my friend's brother wrote. More to come on that as it is my next active project.
The lyrics are based off of a Yeats poem (here's a link to it). To start, I started messing around with a piano in HalionOne (comes with Cubase 4) added some delay, bit crushing, phasing, and reverb, and there we were. then I started playing the bass drum part using Battery 2 until it made this weird kind of offsetting feel that you get in the verses. After that, I picked out a few odd synth sounds (the repeating bells) fit them into the verses and chorus and made an intro synth sound that I later applied to the chorus and ending. Then after singing a lot of different versions, the chorus came out. I like how the chorus came out.
I spent a long time working on the verses. I sang multiple versions and had tons of different effects in mind. None of them really seemed to work out though. Initially, I was going to try to do some Kid A like effects, but never got around to attempting that complex of an effect. I ended up running melodyne, EQ, and compression and running that to a ping pong delay and reverb (the ping pong delay was also sent to the reverb) to get the nice smooth sounding vocal that it turned into. Still not sure if I like the way the vocals mesh in the verses though.
Ironically enough, the ending came last. Finally added a bass part to the song (using a Five String Jazz Bass through the Bass Pod Pro), got some different drums, used some old piano parts that had been rejected for the chorus and cut and pasted some chorus vocals. Actually, these vocals resulted from me doing a looped section which happened to play the beginning and the ending of a chorus in a row, and I liked it. So I copied that and dropped it in randomly in a couple of places. Added some swirly delay / reverbs to the piano and synth at the end, and I was done!
Lyrics
Had I the cloths from the golden light
Or the blue dim from day or night
I would spread them under our feet, oh but,
I hear the feet coming near
the warring words, the lying lies
Had I the cloths, I might spread them round
but I have dreams - the could've been, and shouldn't be that
I hear the feet coming near
the warring words, the lying lies
I hear lies
I hear lies