Hey Catherine! black mile to the surface is one of my favorite albums of all time. Sincerest of thank you’s for your part in it.
i had a couple questions about tempo.
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i was wondering what role tempo played in pre production vs actually on tracking day for that album?? were you guys making tempo changes like the drop chorus of the gold on the spot? just generally curious of that process!
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I was curious if you all did any beat mapping instead of using a click for the songs since the band was playing so much live in the room?
all the best!
Hi Austin!
These are really good questions. Thank you!
- I find that identifying the tempos during demoing and pre production is usually really important and can be very informative. During pre prod I will usually tap the tempo to find the average of where they are playing it at naturally. On the day of tracking we use it as a starting point but it can go up or down a couple of bpm depending on the energy in the room.
For The Gold specifically I think we did alter the tempo and then mapped out the tempo differences for each section before nailing the final performance.
2.From memory I don’t think we did any heavy duty tempo mapping other than small dips or increases between sections. However I recently did a record where the songs were played to a click but then we tempo mapped the natural shifts of the drummer and created a new click after settling on a final performance. This allowed the movement to steer away from a static grid and seemed to make the speeding up and slowing down into sections feel more human. Any nudges to kicks or snares were made to the new grid. It takes a little more time to identify the tempo of each bar but also means you can avoid beat detective ;-). Not for every project but definitely suits the live band in a room energy.
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Thank you for the reply! this was veryy insightful.
also building the grid around the drummers groove sounds super interesting. im excited to hear the result when this record comes out 