Pick Me Apart!

One of the fascinating blogs that I have been following for a while now is Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture Blog.  This wonderful site is devoted to all things related to music production, and one of the real gems that can be found here - at least on ocassion - are some deconstructed mixes of some classic tunes.  You can find here takes of Mick Jagger's vocals from the Rolling Stones' classic Brown Sugar, never-before-heard (by too many people) outtakes of Beatles sessions, vocal-only parts of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, and a host of other wonderful, illuminating pieces.  The whole site is like an continuous online Classic Albums trip.  Check it out.

Mr Owsinski, himself an accomplished musician and producer, has inspired me to chuck up my own version of the isolated tracks song.  Here's the link to Sweet Execution, featuring isolated vocals and drums.

This tune came together very quickly, with all of the writing and recording for the 'band' done in an afternoon.  The vocals were all completed in three takes for each part (that is, three attempts at each of the parts for verse, verse double, chorus, chorus double, outro and outro double), excepting the chorus harmony which was done in one take, with the third take of each track being the final version used.  Vocals took around half and hour.

For the vocals sound I used TRacks clipping, the awesome Jack Joseph Puig vocals compression, and TRacks EQ, all recorded with a lovely Rhode SM6 microphone.  The vocals for the chorus were tweaked just a little with Da Tube distortion.  The vocals at the outro were sweetened with just a touch of CSR Hall reverb.

The drum track is a sequence of Addictive Drums samples cut up by moi.

It's possible to hear a little background noise at times, but as this is all done with a bit of DIY, fuck cleaning that shit up!!!

I hope you get something out of it.