|
Listen Close is a weekly feature where I take a long hard listen to a song that really grabbed my ears. I think about which elements of the mix have got me so interested and try to understand how and why they work, as well as how they can give me a better perspective on my own productions.
This week I’ve been paying close attention to Jack Garratt’s new album, ‘Love, Death & Dancing’ which was released on the 12th of June 2020. I’ve found myself particularly taken with the track ‘Time’, which I first heard when it was released as a single back in February. Produced by Garratt and Jacknife Lee, ‘Time’ is the opening track of the album on streaming services, though curiously features much later in the track listing if you buy a physical copy of the album. David Wrench handles mixing duties and Heba Kadry mastered the album.
You can listen to this track, and all the tracks previously featured in Listen Close, via the Mix Perspective Spotify playlist embedded below.
I’ve been listening to the album on Apple Music, and as such ‘Time’ feels to me most at home as an album opener (check out my thoughts on another album opener here). In this context, the ‘start small and expand’ philosophy of production is on full display (If you haven’t heard the track in full yet, now is a good time to do so to get the full impact of that expansion!).
‘Time’ lives up to its name, stretching out over a 05:37 run time. This is the first clue that despite opening up a heavily pop-leaning album, it’s not afraid to try things that don’t necessarily line up with what we might consider a chart single formula. Sonically the song uses a palette familiar to fans of Jack’s earlier work, sampled drums and synthesizers cosy up alongside Jack’s guitar playing and layers of his signature vocal. Opening with a minimal arrangement ‘Time’ almost constantly expands from beginning to end, introducing live drums, many layers of synth and electronic percussion and at its climax, some triumphant sounding brass. The manner in which that crescendo is reached though, is a little less conventional. Rather than sticking to a standard pop song structure of verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus the track uses its relatively long run time to present something that closely resembles a three act structure, commonly found in storytelling media like TV, film, novels and plays. Elementsofcinema.com helpfully defines this method of story telling like so
If we think of the ‘chorus’ parts that feature the vocal refrain “time is on your side” as the transitions between broad sections of the song, then we can start to see those sections as being our Acts 1, 2 and 3, with each act fulfilling those broad headings. 
The three-act structure in 'Time' by Jack Garratt
Act 1 runs from the start of the track to roughly the end of that first chorus (00:00 to 01:39). The song uses this setup phase to introduce the core elements of the mix, slowly building up the instrumentation as it goes along (it does this starting with a frequency band-limited sound, a trick I wrote about in more detail in my piece on The 1975’s ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’.
By the end of Act 1, ‘Time’ has established a clear priority for the organic elements in the mix. As is common for a pop song, the lead vocal is given pole position, but otherwise the guitars are louder and spread further into the stereo field than the relatively small and narrow sounding drum loop and synth parts. As the first chorus finishes new synth sounds creep into the mix from outside their previously established positions, a pad sound sparkles on the left side and a swelling bass extends its frequency range way down past the band-limited drums and tones of the intro. This signals both the end of the first Act as well as introduces the conflict between the synthetic and organic elements that will gain importance in Act 2. The second Act (01:39 to 04:40) ups the overall energy and urgency of the track, with both the electronic and ‘real’ instruments gaining intensity. The confrontation in Act 2 is presented as a battle for priority between the synthetic and organic sounds in the mix. During the course of this act a back and forth develops between both sides of this conflict, as rising synth pad sounds are seemingly pushed back by distorted guitars while powerful live drum fills momentarily squash the central electronic drum loop. This disruption to the established mix balance generates a sense of musical restlessness that reflects the anxiety portrayed in lyrics like “now everything you think you know of your design, is trembling at the edges” the tension continues to build until the second chorus (02:47) where the track begins to resolve around the realisation that “time is on your side”. This pivotal moment in the story comes at the exact mid point of the track, a key moment in many three act structures, where the central character will have a realisation or gain new information that will drive them towards the end of their story. From this point the anxiety of the lyrics dies away and the mix begins to move away from feelings of unrest and towards a sense of balance between the synthetic and organic elements. The aggressive electric guitars begin to relax and the central drum and synth loop achieve a much higher position in the hierarchy of the mix, intimating that some sort of resolution between these elements is being achieved. As this section continues to build towards a conclusion, a formant shifted vocal loop asking"‘are your ready?" is introduced, blurring the lines between what it is an electronic element and what is organic, furthering the sense that the conflict is being resolved and a new balance is being reached. This eventually leads into the introduction of brass instruments (from 04:00), which finally burst through the production at 04:40 heralding the arrival of the final section. Act 3 is typically given the heading of Resolution, and here this is demonstrated in a euphoric climax, with both synthetic and organic aspects of the production slotting together and working hand in hand, both rhythmically and melodically. The vocals disappear completely from the last minute of the song, and no lyrical answer to the question “are you ready?” is given. Despite this, the uplifting and confident nature of the sound in the final act strongly suggests that the turmoil felt by the central character has been overcome. By using its first act to introduce you to a character and their surroundings, pushing them through a tense second act filled with conflict before arriving at an uplifting and cathartic finale, ‘Time’ tells an immensely satisfying story. While 05:37 might seem long for a pop song, breaking this length into a distinct three-act structure allows ‘Time’ to take the listener on the kind of complex emotional journey that a two hour film can often struggle to deliver, while at the same time giving it a unique flavour amongst competing pop records. Get That Sound
There are a number of exciting mix moments dotted throughout the epic 05:37 length of ‘Time’, but there is one vocal effect that really caught my ear, and I couldn’t resist trying to figure out how it was done and have a go and reproducing it myself.
At 00:57 as Jack sings the line ‘and losing your mind’, the word ‘mind’ seems to lift off into another dimension, being drawn out until it abruptly cuts off at 01:05. Enlisting a friend to copy Jack’s vocal and provide me with a dry version of the lyric to play around with, I set about trying to recreate the moment. First listen to the original vocal, treated with EQ, compression and a plate reverb to approximate the vibe of the original track.
Original vocal sound
My first instinct when trying to emulate the sound was to reach for SoundToys' Little Plate plugin. Little Plate features the ability to set a reverb decay time of ∞, infinity, which I knew could easily give me the length of the effect required.
Inserted onto an auxiliary channel, I automated the amount of vocal sent to that bus so just a small slice of the word mind reached the effect, and used volume automation on the return channel to shape the sound similarly to the original song, take a listen below.
Vocal with SoundToys' Little Plate effect
As you can hear, Little Plate happily produces the repeating and drawn out sound which definitely creates an interesting quality, but the nature of this plate reverb is to dull the sound over time, which doesn't quite provide the excitement of the effect in 'Time'. You can see the plugin settings used for this effect below, an EQ before and after the reverb help to push the sound closer to what I was hearing in 'Time'.
Determined to get closer to Jacks' effect, I knew that I needed a more mid focused reverb that still had the ability to stretch out to ridiculous lengths. For this I turned to ValhallaDSPs' ValhallaSuperMassive plugin, which uses delay lines to create huge swirling reverberant sounds. Importantly it allows you set a feedback amount of 100%, which would theoretically give that infinite decay time. Using the same automated aux send and after a lot of fiddling with the parameters on both SuperMassive and the EQ plugins either side of it, I was able to produce the sound below.
Vocal with ValhallaDSPs ValhallSuperMassive effect
This feels a lot closer in tonality to the 'Time' effect and the ability to set the delay time in a much more specific way gets us a step closer rhythmically as well. You can see the settings used to create this effect below.
Although I didn't entirely nail the effect as heard in 'Time', it's worth remembering with effects like this, the sound used to input into the effects processors is a key component to the end result. I haven't made my singer sound exactly like Jack Garratt, and that's a good thing! Part of the excitement of effects like this is that they are totally specific to the singer in question, and we can use this example as inspiration to create our own unique sounds.
The mix decisions made throughout ‘Time’ are crucial to the three act structure being successful, as well as keeping the song engaging to a first time listener over its long length (for a pop song). Being the first single released for the album, the track can’t afford to lose the attention of someone who’s come to the track via radio play or a playlist.
‘Time’s key approach to this task is to present a mix that constantly shifts and evolves, consistently changing which instruments have priority, and how much of the frequency spectrum each part is afforded. Like many modern pop mixes, ‘Time’ also deploys many musical and mix ‘moments’ to add excitement to any sections that might otherwise feel repetitive, while also adding to the overall character of the track. This commitment to changing sounds as the story progresses is most evident in the treatment of the electronic drum parts, which are allowed to increasingly expand out into the frequency spectrum as the track progresses. At the beginning of the track, these drums are simply a single percussion sound looping, with a very limited frequency range (roughly 200Hz – 3kHz), in the middle section this is expanded out with a kick drum sound that extends down to the 40Hz region as well as hi-hat and cymbal sounds that push up into 10kHz territory. During the final act, this is expanded once more with strong mid range clap and snare sounds and even more high frequency content is present in additional percussion loops. While as a producer or mixer we know that this expansion is through additional parts being added, as a listener they all register as part of the same thing, the drumbeat that is rhythmically driving the track, and the mixer has treated them as such.
The final moments of the track strip the music back to just these drums and a single synth part, which mirrors the opening of the track, the tonal changes that have occurred solidify the sense that a fundamental change has occurred throughout the song and a new equilibrium has been established.
The main electric guitar part also undergoes its own tonal transition, using a dense reverb to gain additional mid range body in the middle section (compare 00:15 to 01:41), and then loses some of its top end clarity and boomyness as it moves to support the brass lines towards the end of the song (04:33). These changes in tonality allow the same instrument to perform different functions as the track progress, the extra low mid heft helps to make the middle section feel denser and more powerful, while reducing the high frequencies as more instruments are introduced makes room for the newer ‘more important’ brass parts. ‘Time’ uses these shifts, and many others, to move the overall feeling of the mix from its sparse beginning through to its dense and powerful climax in ways that feel natural and support the overall journey. For me, this is what makes the track so successful, while critical listening has revealed a seemingly complex production approach to ‘Time’, these decisions are not obvious to the casual listener, as the production flows naturally from section to section giving you the satisfying feeling of being taken on a journey. It’s important to be able to see our mixes and productions from the ‘zoomed out’ perspective of someone hearing it for the first time, with no access to the knowledge of what each track is doing or why decisions were made. It feels clear to me that the idea of telling a story with the song was integral to its writing and production, with the mix decisions balancing between this core idea and fitting into the sonic landscape of modern pop. Successfully navigating these two ideas gives ‘Time’ a unique feel, and has definitely helped it stick in my mind long past my initial listen.
Stray Observations
Further Listening
The whole of ‘Love, Death & Dancing’ is packed with fun mix and production ideas, but if the climax of ‘Time’ has you in a dancing mood, follow it up with Garratt's current single ‘Better’. Mixer David Wrench has a wide range of interesting credits to his name, for another sprawling and evolving track check out ‘send my love’ by Marika Hackman, from her 2019 album ‘Any Human Friend’, co-produced and mixed by Wrench.
Thanks once again for taking the time to join me in overthinking one of my favourite recent productions, leave your thoughts on the track in the comments below and don’t forget to follow my Instagram account for a reminder when ever new posts go up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
RSS Feed