“Oh! What A Time To Be Alive” is this thing in completed form. It took a bit (especially for a two minute song) but it was worth it in the end :)
Oh! What A Time To Be Alive ©2024 Nicholas Toone
Song Notes
A long, long time ago, early in the mystical year of 2020, I found myself messing around on my hi-hats. I was trying to mimic that style one hears in trap/pop/hip hop by doing quick buzz rolls on 1 and 4 and filling in the 2 and 3 with simple 8th note single strokes – all on top of a simple four on the floor kick. I eventually settled into the pattern you hear on the song and decided to record it in Reaper, and save it with the working title “Cidada Hats” 1.
I would come back to it a few times over the years. At some point I came up with that funky bass line (recorded via my Ampeg PF-350 before I sold it) and added some basic, clean, delayed guitar and even some shakers and a tambourine. And… it sat on my drive.
I came back to it this summer in a big way. I was going through my folders, doing a cleanup and saw the silly Cidada Hats directory and decided to see if there was anything there and, as the post from August details, I ended up doing some surgery:
- Deleted the clean/delayed guitar outright.
- Deleted the shakers and tambourine.
- Edited the fuck out of the composition. The original had three verse sections (each verse double what they are now) and four choruses and running about five minutes. It basically followed a pattern I was stuck on for my last two releases. It was too much. So I cut/moved/rearranged the drums and bass into the structure you hear now. Short, simple, to the point. The track is now just a shade over two minutes.
Once the editing was done, I added heavy guitars guitars to the choruses via my Ibanez played through ToneLib GFX. Again, nice and simple. The final bit was some synths using SURGE XT presets. One of these was a preset that I tacked on to the back end of the verses as a goof but I wound up enjoying it so much that I figured out how to play on guitar to add as a double to the synth. The guitar double is not super obvious in the final mix, but if you listen carefully, it’s there.
A more recent thing I fixed up was sound of the kick. It was lifeless. Hollow. Of course it was recorded using the old Intex kit I talked about here. I didn’t even try to EQ it into something. I just replaced it with a sample. Sometimes it’s the best and/or only option. I then added the snare, toms, and splash in the chorus using the SSD5 Free plugin played manually via a midi controller 2.
The hi-hat, on the other hand, is the original I put down way back in 2020. Thankfully I’d direct mic’d it with a GLS ES-57 3. It was easy to compress and ratchet up the high end to give it that crisp, trap like buzz right where I wanted it to.
The lyrics and vocals were the easiest of the three I recorded on the rented equipment. I’d had vocal pattern nailed down and the lyrics about 90% complete since the early summer 4.
Note: The artwork is a heavily edited stock photo by Pavlofox on Pixabay. The logo font is DymoFontInvers by Manfred Klein and [smartphone] by woodcutter Manero – both downloaded from FontFreak, my go to site for wacky fonts of all shapes and sizes.
1: I chose the working title of “Cicada Hats” because of this stupid fucking video where Rick Beato whines about the sounds of the hi-hats in an Ariana Grande song and compares them to the sound cicadas make.
2: I managed to snag a used M-Audio Oxygen 25 Third Gen from Kijiji for like twenty-five bucks.
3: I did record overheads as well, but they were shitcanned even before I’d started to edit the song structure. They were really serving no real purpose at all.
4: It all started when the “heaping dose of shit” line came to me one day during a company all-hands that was, well, not fun. It took me maybe a day and a half to come up with the rest. From there it was simply tweaking and editing in the name of cadence.