Retrospectacle #4
In which Tim walks us through the mix of Sweet Billy Pilgrim's Kalypso (the Mercurys one with the Bb dishwasher on it)
Most songwriters say that they don’t ever listen to their own stuff, embarrassed perhaps that it might seem a bit narcissistic or - god forbid - nostalgic. Connected to this is the inability that most creative people have (as discussed last week) to pause for a moment and acknowledge the joys of the process itself, and maybe even briefly celebrate the successful bits of the outcome. I’m still terrible at the latter, but I thought it might be interesting to look at process via an original mix of a Sweet Billy Pilgrim song - in this case, Kalypso - to see what my musical brain was doing back then.
The answer seems to be: everything at once.
The actual kitchen sink doesn’t make an appearance, but nearly all the white / kitchen goods surrounding it do (more about that here). I remember starting with the dishwasher’s resonant THRUM, then developing it - with the addition of pitch-shifted ukulele and a harmonised bass part - into something resembling a song.
So, I switched on a microphone to record my thoughts as I looked at the mix on-screen, and it turned out I had about twenty minutes-worth of them, which I’m sharing with subscribers below. It’s clearly unscripted, and delivered with all the panache of a man delivering a YouTube tutorial on press-stud replacement, so, sorry in advance for that.
I work in in digital audio workstation / production package called Logic. That’s the Arrange page you’ll be looking at (I do give a brief overview of how it works), and it’s worth expanding the clip to full-screen to absorb the true glory of all those coloured oblongs, weird channel names and dancing meters.
This is a post for paid subscribers, but if anyone is curious and skint (two words that pretty much sum up my creative life), I’d be more than happy to send you the YouTube link. Just email us at: sweetbillypatron@gmail.com.
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