Murf is 4 years old. Here are some of my thoughts as I reintroduce it:
emotional side:
It’s difficult to be close to things.
Lord give me the grace to accept the things I cannot change: say we all, aloud or not, with frustration or tranquility, or resignation. I hope we all might find that grace someday, in some form, for some time.
Murf, both at the time of its release, and in my recent revisitation, is a lesson in how to change with efficiency and grace. A song is not the real world. Which is why I generally don’t get chills when I listen to country music (the sonic equivalent of the kid who will venture no more than 10 miles from the spot of their birth until the day they die). For me, a song does not reflect the real world for the sole reason that I have complete control over it. Would that we could reach into the nuances of our own lives and change them with the same precision.
As a young artist, the idea of complete control meant adding instruments, sounds, rhythms, sub rhythms, melodies with delirious fervor. 90 seconds into Murf, it’s likely become apparent that there are a lot of things going on. In the original mix, there were drums on top of drums, complex gelatinous guitars wobbling, 2 bass tracks, and an unending desire for all of these elements to SLAP. TO really fucking hit hard, with the mistaken notion that the listener would be invigorated and simultaneously hypnotized by an undeniable slew of pure deified sound.
And it kind of worked. The number of people who reached out to me after I took Murf off Spotify genuinely surprised me. Nearly all of my close friends mentioned it. People I’ve never met before dm’ing me on IG. My dad, who referred to Murf as “that CD with the music on it”. And that is the truth of the matter despite what my outlook might be, people enjoyed Murf. It was the first song that garnered 1,000 plays for me on Soundcloud. The guitar solo still gives me shivers, an enduring love letter to Thin Lizzy. The adaptation of Kookaburra at the end. All of these things I consider unique implementations of my love for music.
I took it down because I could never get past the idea of it as exhausting, grating, poorly executed on the mix level, and as a result not a reflection of what I believe in, and by further extension not what I want to be known for. Let me make that clear: It’s not the melodies, or the lyrics, or the soul of the song that bothered me; it was purely the execution. There are endless technical details that provide the basis for that dissatisfaction and I’ll attempt to cover briefly some of them later as well as provide some comparisons between Murf 2.22 and Murf 1.11, and hopefully make clear the what I tried to do this time around.
But first, let’s talk about what has not changed.
Murf is a dream, and dreams are why I like music. I had just come off an album of somewhat traditional songs titled Goodnight From Channel 2, which I had recorded largely in Ann Arbor in 2014-2015. It was somewhat of a love letter to the classic pop and psychedelia of the late 1960s that had been a pillar for my love of music since I was 15. It has likely been scrubbed from the internet… Though there is a music video for a song called Reward, made by a now defunct label in the UK. Their excitement to release the album on vinyl was invigorating and validating, but largely a pipe dream, looking back.
I had just got a new mic, a behemoth of a guitar pedal by Moog called the Midi MuRF (hmm…) and I felt like I wanted to go in a more polished direction that blended rnb, pop, psychedelia, into what Gordon Ramsey might describe as “me on a plate”. Murf, along with two other tracks Don Valley and Kaleidoscope provided the launch pad for me executing that vision. I didn’t REALLY know how to mix, but I thought I knew how to mix. This was pre-Fabfilter era which rocket-shipped me to a new level of understanding in audio engineering. This bullheaded approach allowed me to complete these songs, but in a forced way. A way that yielded a product somewhat at war with itself.
I track the opening chords, and because I can’t sync the MuRF pedal to logic** I have to resort to some lost jerry-rigged hybrid of math and music to try and approximate the correct BPM to play. I drop in a few Hanna Barbera style villainous laughs, and I’m off to a woozy kind of place, high above.
** several years later when I did finally sync MuRF to logic it was like watching the melanin deprived folk try and clap on beat to a baptist service. Yeah it was technically synced, but it was absolutely not in the groove.
By the time a quadruple tracked guitar solo hits, I’ve already dropped a handful of Star Wars and Pokémon references, ideas that stubbornly persisted (AND PERSIST PROUDLY, cause fuck ya’ll I love movies and games) in my writing for lack of what I considered valid emotional material to draw on, as to that point, the last handful of years had been spent doing nothing but learning how to produce and not exactly developing relationships or you know, having feelings (other than aching ears and stifled jealousy at certain more mature and popular music acts).
Despite all this, it does seem the lyrics are undeniably unified by a single idea: the idea of dying and passing through to higher place. Does a giant Kookaburra greet me in the clearing at the end of the path? I dunno but Im sure as hell singing about it, whatever my intentions might have been.
It may seem odd to not know what my intentions were lyrically, but I posit to you that a lot of musicians write stuff that sounds good first and has meaning only as an afterthought… I certainly have historically considered myself a music person over a lyrics person, and as such I often don’t have the clearest lyrical intentions when writing.
I consider myself a somewhat talented singer in that I do not hate my voice, but during this time I had awful technique and did nothing in the way of exercising or warming up my vocal chords. I also hadn’t the slightest idea how to relax while singing. All of this provided fertile ground for 70+ vocal takes in a single session, which I can assure you is an exhausting, demotivating, and entirely unwanted and unnatural process. It took many years to understand what I should be thinking about and feeling when I sing, and what’s more HOW to sing into a microphone, a process which is not intuitive and differs depending on the nature of what you want to achieve.
What perhaps allowed this song to exist despite all of that, is that I accidentally wrote it in my vocal range. This was during a period of my creativity where I didn’t consider what would be comfortable for my specific voice to sing when I was writing songs. Placing limitations on my abilities, no matter how small, seemed to threaten derailing the entire process. The beginning is a fragile time and delusion is sometimes necessary to ensure confidence (real or manufactured) can keep the whole thing running.
technical side:
My main goal with Murf was to cut out everything that wasn’t completely necessary, be this tracks or frequency information, etc... As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot going on on this track. More is more. As such, though, only a few things can slap. Everything can NOT slap, that borders on noise, which is someone’s bag but it ain’t mine.
It helps to divide things into their obvious groups. 4 drum tracks, one sampled drum loop, and one loop of me beat boxing have to sound like 1 cohesive unit. 4 synths have to work as one. The bass has to guide without getting in the way.
Most of this is achieved through EQ, and more specifically with Fabfilter’s Pro-Q2, which is the single biggest workhorse in my toolbox today. Its visualizer and freeze mode help me see very quickly areas that are resonant or over represented in the mix.
The first thing I did, however, was simply level. I turned down a lot of the drum tracks to the point where you sort of get the impression of them rather than feel them slap. Compression was used on the loops and midi velocity editing was used on the midi tracks to bring everything to a somewhat even level . Most of the drum tracks have been scooped in the mid range leaving room for the rest of the track to sit.
The kick drum was tuned specifically for each part, and during the first bar of the second part, the kick is gradually tuned down 4 semitones (with automation) such that by the time it reaches the appropriate key there’s a subconscious sense of satisfaction as everything falls into place.
The original had a descending chime synth which I completely removed, deeming it superfluous.
As for the pads, the synth pads were highly compressed and cut in the midrange as compared to the original allowing them to sit better, giving melodic cohesion, but aiming to stay out of the way of the vocals as the original had quite a bit of mid range presence which conflicted with the vocals.
The choir pads also were severely tamed, low passed to remove some harsh resonances that clashed with the already gritty nature of my breathy vocals, and turned down to give more of an impression rather than a leading roll. They were also mid cut.
The vocals aren’t my best performance and were pitch corrected on some particular words, something I might’ve been too proud to do originally. The product is made better for it and I’m not ashamed to admit I have improved vocally in the interim period. Vocals were high passed to about 150hz with some nasty lower frequencies being removed. This helps to give the impression of my voice being farther away, hopefully in the song and not in front of the song.
Some completely unnecessary vocal effects busses were completely removed, particularly for the falsetto vocals in opening sequence. They did nothing but add excessive mid range presence that quite frankly added nothing vital to the song.
The bass was probably the biggest challenge, specifically the live tracked bass guitar. For some reason I had a very intense bass amp emulation which boosted a lot of the lower mids, probably in an attempt to make that shit slap, lol. Removed that immediately, cut the sub frequencies up to approx 100hz, cut the lower mids and lows such that each note had approximately the same frequency response and compressed the hell out of it to further smooth it. The bass level proved to be the last most stubborn variable to nail, and I’m not entirely sure it’s ideal but it’s more than good enough.
In the context of any track the bass level affects how the human ear perceives the rest of the song, specifically the higher end. The more bass, the less presence you experience on the treble end. They sort of get washed away. The bass in Murf is part to guide the groove, but also to sort of distract from the harsh grittiness of the vocals. The mic I was using (Avantone CV-12) was not particularly suited to my voice and exacerbated the breathy side oft the spectrum to a somewhat unpleasant level. The bass in the song helps to tame the perception of that grittiness, which sometimes can’t be effectively eq’d out without neutering the vocal performance.
The guitar solo is probably my favorite part of the song, the repetitive bits are extremely satisfying to listen to. Nevertheless, I eq’d a ton of harsh peaks out and compressed it (it WAS NOT COMPRESSED AT ALL originally) to smooth out a very dynamic performance and help it sit properly.
On the mastering end, I don’t have much in the way of EQ, I like to eq by adjusting levels and eq’ing if necessary on the mix side. Compressed at a ratio of 1.5 with a soft knee to approximately -2.2db at the loudest. Limited to +1 - 2db on a VU meter calibrated to -7 dBFS. Some slight mastering chorus with Soundtoys Microshift. No stereo imaging.
It definitely loses something when summed to mono but that’s almost always the last thing I worry about these days, and I’m sure that’ll be something I figure out and begin to value over the next 5 years as my songs are played during NBA playoff commercial breaks.
Took the album art with my phone. I used some patterned scarves I found at a vintage store.
That is Murf. I hope you enjoy :)
For those of you who are curious, here is a side by side comparison of the old master versus the new one. You will hear the old master first. The difference really cannot be understated.
