Mindful Minerals

As seen on my first blog post, I was intending to do a full story-telling instrumental following the life of a meteorite (with some creative liberties of course). I then decided to focus on the Middlesborough Meteorite in particular and make it more tied to Middlesborough in general.

I ultimately decided against this as I semi-trialled it a couple of times and just could not quite achieve what I wanted to, deleting the entire project file both times out of frustration. I then had a sudden rethink and pivoted back to my amethyst idea after attending a vocal workshop with singer-songwriter and vocal meditator Beccy Owen. I found the experience to be strangely… connecting? Even just singing a small chant with harmonies made me feel quite emotional but in a peaceful sort of way if that makes sense.

I ultimately decided upon a two-part vocal meditation piece that involved crowd interaction in the final performance. As it had to be a maximum of six minutes, I decided to use the first minute for an introduction and breathing exercise, as the success of the performance relied entirely on the crowds willingness to sing along. The first vocal section was a collaborative chant between 1:00 and 3:30. For some reason, I settled on “I am here, I am okay.” repeated fifty million times, up until I got a chance to trial the performance during the dress rehearsals (did not work, more detail on that later). There is then another break for talking, and finally the second part begins, a sustained crowd harmony that I sail over-top of with vocals. I acquired a Tibetan singing bowl from a friend and booked a flexspace in the music studios for a couple hours and got to work.

The Composition Process

I found that the singing bowl is tuned to a middle C, with some absolutely crazy overtones. I found out how crazy the overtones were as I repitched my recording of it down by one and two octaves, neither sounding anywhere near a C. I used a harmonics resonator to fine-tune the pitch and quite liked the different pitches I was getting and kept them. I also added tons of reverb to basically everything to really space everything out. The strange crystal-ish ringing sound you can hear fade in about 30 seconds in is a pair of crystal wine glasses I stole from work (not really stollen, I asked very politely) that I dinged together and paulstretched to about 60x its original length. I then pitched it down a few octaves so it wasn’t so mind-meltingly shrill. I finetuned it to a more pleasant harmony in the Cmaj key.

The deep wubwubwubwub sound is actually a kick drum I sampled, paul stretched and reversed. It acts as an almost organic, womb-like sound that’s quite comforting, and works well as a transitional sound. I did, however, crank the bass frequencies up a little too high, but it sounds fine through headphones. If I do anything with this track later I will tone it down a bit though. What I didn’t expect to use so much of is piano and it’s featured throughout the track as three separate recordings, two of which are timestretched as pleasant ambience. The third is played at its original speed as a melodic climax and end to the composition. Running water and a crinkling (clean) plastic wrapper I found in the studio were added as little ambient sounds throughout.
Here is the finished instrumental that I somehow banged out in about three hours:

The Performance Process

I first made the track instrumental only as I intended to get a recording of the performance itself at the Hancock museum, as the crowd vocals were so pivotal to the composition. In hindsight I should have done a vocal version first in order to test how well the vocal parts actually worked. I had a general plan for the timing, as stated before, that was essentially:
A one minute introduction + breathing
Two and a half minutes of chanting
Thirty seconds of talking, demonstrating the harmony section
Two minutes of harmony and wordless vocalisation

I picked a few friends that were comfortable singing in front of others to act as stand-ins, hoping to encourage more of the crowd to sing. I intended to do a workshop with the two stand-ins but couldn’t quite find the time so, as a result, the dress rehearsal was my first and only trial. Only one of them could make it to the dress rehearsal and that, combined with both a small group watching and underdeveloped speaking parts, made the dress reharsal incredibly awkward. I also relied on the Tibetan singing bowl too much, causing myself to lose track of the vocal parts… AND my laptop just happened to go on sleep mode halfway through and pause the track. However, because of this, I ended up going off and further refining the timeline, script and lyrics… and changing some settings on my laptop.

Luckily, both of my stand-ins could make it to the actual performance. The performance itself went very well, despite how nervous I was. On one hand, I’d just done this exact performance and it went horrendously. On the other, it couldn’t go any worse than it did in the rehearsal. Either way, the lyrics I actually wrote went:
Lilac hiding
In the dull grey
Crystalising
Opens and breaks
It’s a simple four-line, four-syllable chant with a simple melody that’s easy to both teach and learn. I was also aware when writing them that I needed to tie the lyrics into amethyst a bit more as it was previously quite vague.

To my absolute delight, everyone in the crowd joined in and even took the breathing exercises seriously. I also had a few comments afterward congratulating me and saying it was, and I quote, “really cool”. I will say, however, having found out a family member died days before made it hard to not tear up hearing everyone sing along with me. Although only a short performance, essentially a bitesize vocal workshop, I could have kept going for hours. If I had a video on hand, I’d post it here. When I get one, I’ll upload it!

Final Recording

After the unexoected success that was my performance, I now had the fully developed vocal ideas for the composition. I intended to grab a few friends to record the crowd vocals with me but unfortunately none were available in time so I had to thug it out and do it all myself. Not an issue whatsoever though, I have experience in sitting down for two hours and rerecording vocal parts seven or eight times hahaha. The very first thing I altered, though, was the paulstretched kick drum. It was far too loud and boomy. It’s now toned down a lot, but still present.

Recording the vocals was pretty simple, overlaying a lot of the same melody for the chant and then a few with simple harmonies that creep in. For the second part (sustained Cmaj harmony) I just built up the chord one layer at a time, making sure to sing the notes at different times so there were no gaps in the crowd vocals. I then duplicated the tracks, offset the timing by maybe 50ms, and then panned the doubles to opposite sides to give it a fuller sound. It essentially went:
One pair at -50 and +50
One pair at -40 and +40
One pair at -30 and +30
And so on, but not leaving any on 0 (thats for my lead track)
I then recorded said lead track, essentially just improvising a melody to sail over the top of the chants and Cmaj chord. I chose to do it in an almost gospel style, while throwing in some C mixolydian runs like I did in the performance. Finally, I added a room reverb to all of the backing vocals, and a ton of reverb and echo on my main vocals.
This is the final track: