Guilty Conscience Music Blog

With a skipping hi-hat, a disco sample, some tight drums, hand claps and a funky bass line this is what some call disco house, though that label seems to have fallen out of favour recently. Verse, chorus and bridge structure are here and some higher instruments lend the colour to the bass refrain on which the track relies. There’s some strings (wait ’til the end) and all manner of other things adding interest. Groovy?

I spend some time on community sites for musicians and I found some audio files by Lavida on her page on SectionZ. The vocal was just her and a basic heartbeat sound which I EQ’d out. All the other parts were written around the vocal in the original tempo. It has a pounding beat which is quite hypnotic and her vocal floats about the track. One reviewer on Garageband commented that it would be good if the vocal was more prominent (with less reverb) but as I only have access to the audio file with reverb on already, it can’t be done until someone gives her a deal/pays for studio time! Though it is a sparse mix, there’s a nice piano around 3′36″, the chords of which could be expanded for a more harmonically rich song.

A dirty, gritty electro number this one. The essential groove is insistent but with sweeps and some delayed guitars, it moves along nicely. The drums are overdriven (consciously so) and compressed within an inch of their life. This give the acoustic sound the power needed to compete with the other powerful parts.

Like many of my tracks, it is essentially in a traditional song structure and has plenty of space in the mix for a vocal. Really, this would be essential for it to be anything other than a reasonable instrumental. Vocalists; form a disorderly queue.

Where’s that from? Ooh, it sounds so familiar this guitar riff. The clue is in the title for those struggling. This track is based around a sample from one of the greatest bands to come from the Motown label. If, by some cruel twist of fate you are a lawyer for said label, I’d just like to point out that I’m just a struggling musician which perhaps even the Temptations were once.  Oh balls, that’s let the cat out of the bag hasn’t it? Well, in the interest of artistic transparency it’s Cloud Nine; go and buy it, listen to the differences and feel free to post a comment.

Personally, the upright bass felt right from the beginning. There is no over reliance on the sample with plenty of original added parts and although I’ve got a version without it, I feel it is another track entirely to the original. In order to keep the listener from getting tired of the sample, there’s a question and answer structure: The question being the Temptations riff, the answer being my own delayed acoustic guitar part. The part that I am particularly proud of is the breakdown at 2′20″. The insistent chords that come in just seem to wash over you with the samples plus the chopped up drums it’s an understated but effective 16 bar build up. No machine gun snares here just a fusion of the old and new.

So, Mr (or Mrs) Lawyer send me an email and let’s do a deal.