Episode 3 - Glitter on the Dancefloor

The Seed

I've released 5 studio albums as Echo Bloom and the songs on each of them tend to cluster around a stylistic pole.  To a certain extent, that's the goal of an album - to create a set of discrete music that works together as a unified whole.  But it also makes it harder to experiment with new genres.  On an album you want a listening experience that flows, and including a reggae song on a folk album rarely goes well (trust me, I know from experience).

But Hoursongs are different.  Because these songs are written quickly, and are meant to be standalone curios, I give myself free reign to indulge in flights of genre fantasy.  Sometimes that ends up sounding like hot garbage, and other times I find something interesting emerging.

“Glitter on the Dancefloor” ended up as an ode to my love of electronic dance music - New Order and Nine Inch Nails - but it began the way many of my songs do: with an acoustic guitar in a weird tuning.

I'd previously written a song called Black Cadillac using the Open D Minor tuning, and hadn't bothered re-tuning my guitar between writing sessions.  I continued experimenting, and ended up finding something with a similar vibe - spooky, with a low-D drone, and a harmony line moving ontop of it.  I hummed out the vocal melody, and found a phrase that was angular, sharp - 3 lines - short, short, long.

The Arrangement / What Would I Change?

As I kept walking around my kitchen playing the song, the idea of doing something as a straight acoustic thing, or something “spooky” with an atmospheric background seemed too familiar.  And maybe if I was directly working with the band on these that’s what I would have done.  But Hoursongs give me the space to try something different, so I busted out some synthesizers and got busy.

I got the Arturia collection of classic synths a long time ago, mostly because it had good Rhodes and Wurlitzer sounds.  But it also has a ton of more electronic stuff - a CS80, a Synclavier, and a Buchla Easel, among many others.  The core of this song was made using their version of a Sequential Prophet.  I’m no synthesist, so I tend to stick to the presets, and then lightly modify the envelopes to what I like.  The main figure of the song moved from the repeating drone thing, to a more arpeggiated chord thing.  I copied the track and gave the second one a little wobble by using a sweepable EQ filter.  That gave me a general base and immediately transformed the song.

This is the point where I admit to watching a tutorial on how Mutt Lange got vocal sounds for the Def Leppard album Hysteria. I always knew that it was massively multi-tracked, but it turns out that one of his secrets is adding in a double of someone - loudly whispering is the best way I can describe it. So for this, I combined two things:

A whispered vocal track, and a regularly sung vocal track that had a formant filter on it to make it sound deeper.

Finally, in the chorus, one of my great secret weapons - the Fuzz Factory pedal by Z Vex.  There is no faster way to utterly destroy a guitar sound.  I layered two tracks - one just playing chords, and the other one doing a freakout ontop of it. 

So - what would I change:

• I found a cool vocal sound, but the two parts don't line up very well and sounds sloppy.  I could re-sing it, or re-edit it.

• I feel like there's a missed opportunity for the percussion track to have some nice symmetry with the vocal line in the first verse.  Currently, right after the line "Watching bodies throbbing up and down to the kick drum" a tambourine comes in (which also sounds like garbage).  It seems like low-hanging fruit to re-arrange the percussion there and have a - kick drum -  come in there.

• In general, I'd just like to explore this space more.  It was a really fun experiment.  Who knows - maybe I'll make a whole record of this stuff.