Snoozing

We kick off our series of behind the scenes stories with Snoozing.  Tom is the main author of these posts with Andrew and Arch chipping in here and there.

With old-school 8 bit sounds from our charity shop keyboard, Snoozing is a stumbling ‘Ghosts n Goblins’ soundtrack with strummy guitars and bubbling retro synth beats.

It’s about a couch-surfing cat (or mate) that won’t leave - but you secretly love them and miss them when they’re not around. Recording late at night, quietly so as not to wake up the sleeping family, the vocals ended up very Smog’s Bill Callahan.

Originally called Snoring, this slow burner album opener features keyboard sounds from a charity shop find - the mighty ‘Saisho Music Maker Mk500’ which was added to our stash of instruments.

Features include a dodgy speaker and scratchy sliders. It puts itself into shut off mode if you try to play more than four notes in a chord through the speaker. Lucky it includes such advanced features as a 3.5 mm Aux out and a separate headphone out!! There is no midi or quantisation with this bad boy so you are all on your own performance-wise. Make a mistake and it is forever enshrined on the audio WAV. file. PS: Find the hidden Kiwi in the pic.

[Andrew]: I will own up to correcting the timing of some of Tom’s playing - when you can hear it clearly at the start of the song. Once all the other instruments come in, it kinda gets buried in the mix - if you listened to the keys on their own you’d be ‘whoa these are all over the place’. But all in together I felt it made it sound more natural and less robotic, so I left it like that.

Needless to say, and in keeping with our maximalist instincts there’s also a midi keyboard on the track as well, which involved dumbing down Logic Pro’s [AT: the recording and mixing software we use]  highly advanced synth VST (virtual instrument) by reducing its sample rate and bit crushing the hell out of it.

Musically it owes a lot to the New Zealand group the Naenae Express and their fantastic trippy track Sea Anemone. Arrangement wise it started life as just a couple choruses and an outro. No chorus or hook.

Twenty versions later we quietly edited to arrive at a more stripped down intro, a more dynamic chorus and a sweet outro. Enjoy the first track of our new album “Whateverly”.  

Next week Cardboard Cars.... sign up to our mailing list to get updates