Sound Environment & Paris Jungle

A little more than a year ago, I suppose, I was reading Frank Zappa's autobiography, "The Real Frank Zappa Book." In it he talked a little about creating a sound environment for his studio music when he mixed it. That was something I hadn't given much thought to. Generally, the idea Zappa was pursuing was, given that many of the instruments were recorded separately, to make them sound as if they were all playing in the same environment, or room.

The main tool for this these days seems to be reverb. You introduce a varying level of reverb to each track so all the instruments sound like they're in the same space. On some tracks you might not add any, say drums recorded in an open space. But to get a guitar that had been close mic'd to sound like it was playing in the same room, you'd need to add a little reverb to it.

Zappa didn't say much about that but he did mention another method, that of introducing a track of low-level white noise which would produce an illusion that all the tracks were in the same space. That made me think that a candidate for that would be a ride cymbal (think of those wonderfully unified old jazz recordings).

With that in mind, I came up with a quicky bass line and then recorded my drums to that using a quick but simple back beat and keeping the pulse on my ride cymbal (Zildjian 20" ping ride), playing the middle, not the bell. Then I added a kind of cheesy electric piano ditty and a bongo track. I believe it worked. The white noise of the ride cymbal had the effect of unifying the instruments even though I made no reverb or equalizer adjustments to the tracks.

For fun, I decided to change the environment. I went to a more driving rim-shot percussion (still playing the ride) with a slapped bass with echo effects. And I added some distortion to the electric piano. I also introduced some reverb to each track. I had gone from one environment to another. Then I did it again with more echo effects, reverb and heavy distortion on all tracks. The result is rather severe and intense. I ended the song by fading back into lighter environment of the beginning.

The song is called Paris Jungle.

The working mental image I used was that of some French girl riding a Vespa through the streets of Paris and narrowly escaping a collision with other traffic. I'm still working with GarageBand here and the drums are still pretty lo-fi.