Creating Masquerade

Date conceived - 25th June 2024 

Masquerade was another song that I wrote thanks to an audio note I'd previously recorded. It's also a song that came about as I wanted to try a certain "trick"; writing a song based solely around one chord. In the audio note I recorded use quite a bit of muting so that I'm only playing the note three times; on the low E, an octave higher on the D string, and another octave higher on the high E string. Then I change to an E7 chord by adding in the third fret on the B string, and finally changing to an E5 chord by changing from the third fret to an open string on the B.

The video was actually recorded on the 31st March 2023, almost fifteen months before I'd actually start trying to record the song properly. I left it so long as every time I looked back at it I remembered the riff being a bugger to play without accidentally muting or unmuting certain strings. Eventually though I knuckled down and got on with it. It actually only took me three takes to get the rhythm guitar part down, plus an extra two drop-ins to sort out the ending, once I worked out what I wanted.

The fun thing for this song was working out all the extra parts I could add to make it interesting, as the chord never changes. The bassline was integral to bring a sense of difference between the verse and the chorus. For the verse it meanders up and down freely, but for the chorus it mimics the vocal melody exactly. To add an extra dynamic, I recorded a second line one octave higher and then set them to slowly pan between left and right, opposite of each other.

I didn't think a drumkit was suitable for the song, so instead I recorded a tambourine and a shaker, and panned then each off to opposite sides. I also have finger cymbals I'd never used before so I recorded those chiming intermittently throughout the song, though they make a tone slightly below and A note, so I had to pitch them down to an E so they fit in. Finally, I also have a tuning fork in E, so I recorded this and then reversed parts of the recording so the tone of the fork pulses in and out very slowly throughout the song, but with the initial hit removed so as not to create a jarring sound.

For the vocals I added a liberal amount of delay and reverb, but then also reversed the sample to add the same effects again. This way, when it's switched back to playing forwards, you get a delay and reverb effect that you hear before the words are sung.

I played the guitar solo with a stone pick to give the notes a bit of a different sound, but it was only a basic solo and didn't sound very interesting. I decided to add two harmony parts, one low and one high, both played exactly the same way.

Finally, when I came to work out how the song would fade out, I realised that on both basslines, I blew straight past the ending and compensated quite badly by trying (and failing) to play like I knew what I was doing. This reminded me though of the ending of the song State of Independence by Jon & Vangelis. It sounds like people chatting at a party as the music fades out, so I decided to do my own version of this. I left the basslines as they were, and noticed that on the acoustic guide track, I could hear the click coming from my headphones (the microphone having picked it up) so I added that too. On one acoustic take I relaxed a little soon and let out a sigh and slid my fingers across the guitar strings, and on another I heard knocking from the front door in the background (by the DPD guy who was actually delivering my Sire L7 guitar) so I left all of that in. In a world where the choices for a song ending are usually a sudden crescendo or a slow fade out, why choose either?