More on BT's Emotional Technology
Aug 15, 2003 12:00 PM
BT gave an in-depth breakdown of all of his songs on his latest album, Emotional Technology (Nettwerk, 2003) in the August issue. Following are more songs we couldn’t fit in the magazine:
"A Force of Gravity"
That is a track that I got together with JC Chasez of ’NSync. He and I got together in the studio, and I wrote that track entirely on the [Cubase] SX and VSTis. We wrote the vocal. JC sang in about an hour, and it took me about a week to finish it. It was a really quick track. It was one of the quickest tracks on the record. But it’s more in the vein of my sort of traditional progressive-house thing. There’s some really cool sound design at the end of that track. There’s a 303 emulator that came with Computer Music Journal, a VSTi. But I used it through Bubba Warp and Bubba Scratch, which are really hackery-looking VSTis that I get from various places online—just nasty synth sounds at the end of that track that are really cool. All my friends that have remixed it, every single one of them has asked me about what that sound was. So I had to go back and look. I played the song in Hong Kong, and by the end of the track, everyone was singing it.
"Circles"
"Circles" is a song I wrote singing into my crappy tape deck that I’ve had for 15 years and playing guitar. It’s a very personal piece of music. This whole record is very personal, but it’s a particularly personal piece of music. I sat down, wrote out some lyrics, and the beats for that song started with [Native Instruments] Battery. And then one of the main synth lines was actually [Native Instruments] Pro-52, which is one of the Logic plug-ins. So I roughed together a skeletal arrangement of it. And that’s one of the tracks I went into the studio and cut with Richard Fortus, Tommy Stinson and Brain [of Guns N’ Roses]. I played guitar and sang live in the studio. We rehearsed it once; we cut it once. That track took about three weeks to time-correct—tons of live instruments: drums, bass, guitar. And then Richard did some absolutely amazing treated-guitar stuff after the fact, after I comped my vocal, time-corrected the track and added some really cool keyboard parts and cool effects to the vocals—Rasco did some rapping on the track—through my new Line 6 amp. But Richard did some really cool, he calls them, "pterodactyl screams," which are these mental, Ziggy Stardust, atonal guitar riffs. They’re really hypertreated with a lot of pedals. Richard is the only other musician … he’s a consummate musician’s musician. I love that guy. He’s the only other person I know who knows harmonically what’s happening in a piece of music. He’s always being made fun of in Guns N’ Roses; he has his laptop on top of his rig, all this tech-metal shit. So he did some fantastic sound design, a couple of different treatments using these pterodactyl screams. And I cut them into a repetitive line. The midsection of that song is really cool. It’s three bars of 3/4 followed by a bar of 4/4. It feels like two bars of three and one bar of seven. It’s got this really cool turnaround pattern. He did this long pterodactyl treatment cut together in a line. It’s very hooky. It’s one of my favorite things in that song.
"Communicate"
That’s a song that I wrote with Jan Johnston, and it’s a song that I wrote a while ago. It’s seen many different incarnations. Basically, that song is of the sort of progressive variety, for me, along the lines of something like [my track] "Dreaming." And it’s a beautiful vocal that Jan wrote. I did some of the beats on a bunch of shareware VSTi instruments that are specifically for beats. There’s one called Clapz that makes incredible handclaps. Every single drum sound in that is handmade in these shareware things. Again, a thing that’s featured a lot is Rhino, which is an amazing soft synth that’s PC-only. A lot of the textural stuff is that. And then it’s got some pads done on the Exciton on the Mac. And that’s the vibe of that one. It’s a straightforward progressive-house track. It’s a really beautiful song. I wanted to keep that one simple.
"Animals"
It is just a very universal and really powerful lyric. It’s a very simple metaphor talking about humans as conscious animals and that kind of distinction of us, as humans, our consciousness. It’s one of the songs that I’m really proud of because it would stand on its own with just guitar and singing. That’s probably one of the songs I will close my set with when I go on tour. It’s another one of those songs recorded with Brain, Tommy and Richard. But I did a rough of it with acoustic guitar, vocals and beats. And there’s a beat that ended up staying for the verses that I did in [Koblo] Stella9000. It’s the company that makes Vibra 9000. It’s these really creepy Autechre-y–sounding beats. And then I time-corrected them and put them in [Symbolic Sound] Kyma and did this weird spectral blurring treatment to them. They’re one of my favorite sound-designing things on the album. The beats on "Animals" during the verses are really cool.
There’s a vocal that I sang at least 50 times because there are a good 20 different background parts in different sections. And Mike [DiMattia] did a vocal comp to that, and it killed him. He’s still recovering from it. But he’s the master of vocal comping … "Animals" was like his doctoral thesis. He was like, "Dude, what do I do with this ahh sound, and how do I make it go can?" So he’s a whiz at vocal comping now after that song. Again, it was one of those ones that took three weeks to a month just to time-correct the live performance. Then, we mixed it. One of the coolest things about that is that it features the sounds of these guys diving in underwater submersibles. I just thought it was really cool, the [sample] I found online. I’m big into scuba diving. It’s one of these hobbies. And I found this thing online of guys, they can go to something like 9- or 10,000 feet below sea level, and I found this Website where they were diving in these incredibly super-reinforced diving bells. And they were talking about all these creatures at that depth. It was just a really beautiful eerie sound of bubbles. And you could hear the beeping of sonar. I used some of that along with some pads and textural stuff in the beginning of the song. It’s a really beautiful way to start the song.
"The Only Constant Is Change"
This is a song that I wrote on my acoustic baritone guitar. And when I wrote that song, I recorded it almost immediately. The baritone guitar has an electric output on it. And I ran a cable out of the baritone into my [Vox] AC30. I put it down a long hallway in my house. But I close-miked my acoustic guitar, and way, way off in the background, you hear this fucked up distorted-out, reverbed-out version of it, but it’s so soft and so emotional. It’s very powerful and cathartic-sounding. That song starts with the crickets of Maryland and this baritone acoustic guitar. And it’s a very simple vocal. It features some harmonic stuff in the song. There’s an especially interesting bridge that’s got some cool oboe interchange in the middle of it. And it’s in 7/4. But it’s just a very simple song about loss. And I think it’s a great way to close the album. Brain played drums on that song, Richard played one or two guitar parts, and I played bass and guitar. It’s a very sad song.
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