"Way More Ass"
Notes on mixing and arranging the debut album from Glad Pulses
Thanks to everyone who's been reading this Substack and listening to Rearranged.
Some related big news from RearrangedLand today: my band Glad Pulses releases its debut album, Blue and Bright.
This is a fun band to play in for a lot of reasons, but the one I'll write about today is, obvs, arranging. Drummer Adam Koontz, singer/guitarist Eben Dennis, and bassist/singer Chuck Rainville are all huge song aficionados and are sharply attuned to arranging.
Chuck, Eben, and I wrote songs for the album, and we all love many kinds of music, so the album varies quite a bit in style. Adam did a great job of highlighting that variety while establishing a consistent sound across the songs.
In fact, although I mixed the album, it was Adam's close listening and the veteran ear of mastering engineer Al Jones that brought the cohesiveness to the album. On the first round of mixes, Adam wanted a bigger drum sound on the second track, "Wake Up Call," an Eben tune. It's our "rocker," and Adam thought my first mix lacked the song's “punch and frayed edges.”
I sent the band a remix with what I could only think to describe as "way more ass."
He mentioned The Racounteurs. I'd seen them open for Bob Dylan, and I knew what he meant. I sent the band a remix with what I could only think to describe as "way more ass." Adam asked for even more kick drum. I beefed it up: Adam was right to suggest it.
Everyone got on board with that mix, and once I'd mixed a couple more tunes, I sent three tracks to Al to give him a sense of where we were going. He replied asking what thoughts were driving the different sounds of the drum kit. "Wake Up Call," he thought, sounded great. I listened back to the three tracks. Al was right: they were inconsistent. (I wished I'd had a reason to give him for the disparate drum sounds, but it was simply inexperience.)
I brought the EQ and compressor profiles for the drum tracks on "Wake Up Call" into every other song.
And there was the album.
The consistent drum sound did two things: it gave the album a cohesive sound, but it also created a solid foundation that made our arranging choices more obvious to hear.
I'll walk through a few of my favorite arranging decisions on Blue and Bright.
"The 49"
How tightly can you squeeze a pop song balloon before it bursts? This is a short sweet guitar pop tune that I wrote explicitly for this band, knowing that we're all major guitar pop fans, but I wanted to see how much "freakout" I could fit into its two minutes and seven seconds without ruining the "radio blasting, windows down" effect of the song.
In the six measures before each of the first two verses, the bassist does a staccato rake across all the open strings on beats 1 and 3, Eben rakes open strings on 2, and I do it on 4. We're literally just hitting shit. The solo, which owes a big debt to Andy Summers's solo on "Driven to Tears," makes zero musical sense until the last note. Everything else in the song is pure pop: jangly guitars, singing rounds, driving backbeat.
The pop part of the song could be easily rearranged, but the freakout stuff is so unmusical that I wonder if it would resist any attempt at orchestration.
"Schwag"
This beautiful tune by Eben is intensely nostalgic: "a pastiche, a memory" is one of the first lyrics. He's literally announcing a flashback. Since he was being so explicit, I thought I'd be explicit in the arrangement. When he sings that line, I introduce a keyboard that sounds an awful lot like a harpsichord, a sound that immediately sends a listener back centuries in time. Does it sound like some twee Wes Anderson shit? That's okay, too. This is a very visual song for me. Eben's teenage wasteland was in Loudoun County, Virginia, but it was very similar to mine in Bel Air, Maryland. I can see it all; I can definitely feel the nose burn from the “soda can with thumbtack holes.”
"Free Throws"
I played this in the car, and my 12-year-old son pointed at the display and said, "Dad, the seconds change exactly every time there's a new beat." Yep: I don't know if this counts as arranging, but we recorded this song at exactly 60 bpm. I wanted to connect to the way we humans experience time. I also wanted to evoke a resting heartbeat.
The arranging trick here is pulling the music into the story. The song is about basketball, and when the second chorus goes, "Put it up and hear the sound it makes," we all drop out for Adam to take a drum solo. Do I hit a brick? Swish? Does it roll around? Does it bounce halfway across the gym? It's Adam's call every time we play it.
Eben wrote a really elegant piano arrangement for the song, and I composed the bridge for bass, guitar, and piano. This is the only song on the album involving sheet music.
"Can't Get You Off of My Mind/All Right"
This was the biggest surprise for me, arrangement-wise. It starts off as a pretty straight country tune, and I thought that was it. Chuck and Eben had some sense that the last chord could evolve into some kind of pensive outro. Over time we kept pushing that, and when we recorded the song, we let ourselves jam. (This was one of two tracks we recorded live in the studio—the others involved overdubs.) We did three takes and settled on one for the album.
The most interesting outcome here is that we're now all improvising vocally within the jam when we play this live.
Then Eben said he wanted to add a vocal "buh-duh-bupp" part over the jam. I'd never considered adding vocals to a jam. Once he recorded that, we realized how fruitful singing over a jam could be. We started improvising background vocals. That's challenging over instrumental improvisation, but we kept at it, and pretty soon we had a fairly structured vocal part over the jam. Some of the structure came in mixing as I deleted this part and that part (I talked about this strategy, particularly Public Enemy's use of it, in episodes 3 and 5 of Rearranged).
The most interesting outcome here is that we're now all improvising vocally within the jam when we play this live. It's not something I'd ever thought to do, but it's fun. Dangerous, too—awkward vocal choices stick out during improvisation more than instrumental choices.
Anyway, this song ended up far afield from what we'd imagined, and I've got a big place in my heart for it.
"Angreal"
This is a great Eben song, and not just for the opening line ("You can plagiarize yourself/with those old notebooks on the shelf/next to the letters and trinkets and VHS copies/of movies you reach for when you're sick and sloppy").
Eben really took charge of the tune, and it was fun to take his direction. He tries a lot of different ideas in arranging songs, and he's willing to kill things that might sound good but aren't working in his overall conception of the tune. You have to trust him. At one point this was a duet, but I ended up cutting all of my parts. He also asked for a big break where the drums drop out under a big chorus, and it required me to delete part of Adam's drum track and add my own cymbal crash. It's jarring, but it works.
Eben really stuck it out on this arrangement: it's probably the most clearly defined arrangement on the album, and I love it.
I hope you enjoy the record. We're proud of it. It's fun to be in a band with a few different songwriters. It lets us follow the music into different sounds and styles, but I think you'll hear something consistent and defining.
We do have a compact disc, which you can order on Bandcamp or purchase in-person at Normal's Books and Records in Baltimore. Blue and Bright is also streaming everywhere you'd expect it to.
If you’re in Baltimore, you can see us this Friday at Micky’s Joint. We’ll have a couple more northeast Baltimore shows through mid-May:
- Friday April 25, 8pm, Micky's Joint, free, 5402 Harford Rd., 21214
- Sunday, May 4, 5pm, Micky's Joint, free, part of the Hamilton Arts Festival
- Friday, May 16, 8pm, Wax Atlas record shop, 5523 Harford Rd., with The Silverites and Red Eyeballers
