Documenting the recording of "Atonement" - your free mp3 download on the Robert Svilpa ReverbNation page.
"Atonement" was a different piece from everything I'd written to date - the core group of songs for the "A fine line" CD were demo complete, but the collaborations with my friend and band mate Paul Harrington were going so well I chose to continue on writing new material. The risks of writing too much for the CD were thrown aside as I felt confident that we'd be able to hit our marks in what was a rather overextended schedule of production. As a result we produced a song which I hold up as in the Top 5 of all music I'd written to that point and am using as the measuring bar for all new material going forward.
I had been playing with a guitar motif that extended my King Crimson takeaways - a syncopated two guitar thing that had the big grunting chords of Red mixed with the stereo offbeat rhythms of Discipline and Thrak. I'd programmed a drum part that was big and primitive - a compound time signature grouping that resolved to 4. Mark - our bassist - put down his part sitting tight with the programmed drums and guitars wove around this. Key modulations were used to generate tension and momentum - draw the listener in anticipating where this was going. Breaking this up was a semitone modulation and sustained chord leading into a 7/8 swing feel guitar arpeggio with marimba keyboard part playing against each other - rhythm section disappears here until the entire motif modulates up when it hits in again and drives towards reappearance of the Crimson riff. Modulations happen and key rises until we hit a tension point - at this point I had my next section already stemmed in, but there was a need to make the transition a bit more "intentional", and it was a struggle to find the appropriate thing...
As for the appropriate thing - I had the very strange atonal main riff from "First Piece" - in fact I kept coming back to that since doing just ascending or descending scale runs were not at all what this piece demanded. The resulting riff I ended up with was pulled from taking fragments of the melodic minor scale and omitting some notes - keeping the notes clustered in tight fingerings on the fretboard made it playable at tempo, and the strangeness of the riff and the modulation to get to the key for the next section was crucial. I also had to make it somewhat exotic to provide counterpoint to the really groovy section/really straightforward melody line to follow. For the transition bars, the original demo had everyone hitting the notes in descending fashion - drums, bass, guitars and a monosynth line. Final version just has guitars, monosynth, and drums.
The groove that follows - the acoustic and electric rhythm guitars were inspired by Opeth's "Deliverance". Suspended B5 chord moving the pedal tone from B to A being the key item supporting the electric guitar lead that was played horizontally - the melody line starts near the nut on the A string and then your hand moves up the string to hit this ascending notes, using the vibrations from the previous note and by shortening the string, actually increasing the intensity of the vibration and charging the tone considerably. Glissandos on the descending part of the run to maintain the notes, slurring them together. Paul brought in the wonderful Nord B3 organ tones of a old style horror movie holding the sustaining chords of the progression. There's some very high EBow guitar deep in the mix with a lot of delay and reverb - this is the icing on the cake setting a melodramatic tone for the piece. This ends on what is a chromatic chord modulation on the organ up to the ending motif...
The ending motif - it started off as a literal lift of the opening progression from The Beatles "I want you" off of Abbey Road. I have been using IK Multimedia's Amplitube guitar amp emulation software since 2005, and one of the presets was a pseudo-George Harrison patch that was super clean with some slight chorus and a slapback echo on it. I pulled this out and started playing with the "I want you" slow arpeggio, then changing it to be a straight B-minor chord on the upstroke of the pick, but a Bdim5 minor on the downstroke all in 3/4 time. Chord progression then goes to G-min/Gdim5min, and finally Emin/Edim5min with the heavily effected organ stomping all over it. Paul then got to do his magic - an absolutely wonderful bit that sounds like an evil circus caliope doing a foreboding melody for the entire progression. The drums go from quarter note kick hits to eighth note, to 16th note and then 16th note triplets through the fade out, which then brings in a reprise of the EBow guitar orchestra from the beginning of the piece.
The EBow guitar orchestra? That was the last thing to be done. 6 months earlier I'd been messing around with my Digitech Jamman loop pedal for a while but could not for the life of me replicate Frippertronics... At that point I got tired of trying and simply decided to layer guitar sounds in Cubase to map out what I'd like to be able to do in a live setting, and in the space of about 30 minutes I layered 6 tracks in a large chord just warbling along with different hand vibratos which then gave this very ethereal effect. The last track was a very simple melody line - and then everything sat in another project on my disk for the next few months. We had gotten the stuff recorded, and I was at home one evening mixing the piece into a good demo to send off to Andy Edwards for his drums, and I remembered the ebow stuff. Copied and pasted the stuff into the head of the track list... did a quick mix and processing... and wow - that's great! Then thought "hey, the fade out is a bit dry..." so I copied and pasted in at the end of the track and cross-faded - "double wow!!" I packaged the "with drums" and "sans drums" wav files, email them off to Andy for his efforts.
A couple weeks go by, and Andy sends me a very cross email saying I should be sending him tempo tracks for him to record to, but it also contains the drums for "Atonement" which he says that he "quite likes and really got into" playing. Andy did a wonderful bit of playing on this track! I fly the drums in, do some minor adjustments and we get what we have today. Mark did redo bass tracks for the piece and it gets a proper mix/master - but nothing really changed for this from the time it was first demo'd. I dont think we could have gotten it any better, really...
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