Roland D-20 – Page 2

A song a week #15: Powerplant

Here we go, this is track four from “Nowadays” and it’s a special one. This is the one and only Art Fact-track where Måns is not the lead singer. This song was written and performed by Olle, and we thought it was great to leave his vocals on there after he had recorded them to show me how to do it. :)

Olle is pondering his life options on a back yard in Östermalm during a Nowadays photo-shoot.

It’s also a great song I think, with some cool samples! We were experimenting with a sampler that Olle bought for his Amiga computer, but we didn’t have MIDI capabilities for it, so all the samples had to be triggered live-to-tape with the mouse. All the samples are from the 80’s epic bad movie “Mac and me“, simply because it happened to be on the TV when we were recording. During the chorus we used some servo motor sample sounds from the movie, and I think it works really well with the song.

Other than those samples, the song is 100% Roland D-20. The very typical gated kick makes another performance, and the bass line is also one of those digital sounds attempting to emulate analogue synthesizers. It sounds weird today, and probably would have been much better with an actual synthesizer instead, but we had to work with what we had at hand.

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A song a week #14: Mind Controller

For once I have some actual memories from the making of a song! This one started out by me doing most of the music at home on the D-20, and then at some point playing it over the phone to Måns. Yes we used to sit with the receiver pressed up against a speaker and play the whole song through, effectively hogging 100% of our families telephone bandwidth. At least this part of teenage parenting has been improved since then.

Anders outside our "studio" in the school Måns, Jonas and Olle went to. — Anders outside our “studio” in the school Måns, Jonas and Olle went to.

I think it was in the early summer of 1990 that we borrowed the student’s lounge at Adolf Fredriks music school, also known as the Piano Bar, to record the bigger part of what was to become Nowadays, and this song was recorded there. Måns had come up with the vocal melody, and written the first verse. I remember him and me sitting and writing the second verse together (but maybe Jonas and Olle were there too). For me this was something new, I had never participated on writing the lyrics before (and didn’t much later either). I wanted to write songs completely on my own, but didn’t dare even trying to sing, and could never understand how you decided what the lyrics was going to be about. I had nothing to say, really.

One detail I remember is the line “And every time you are saying no / You’ll have a longer way to go” which was a result of me identifying the spirit of what needed to be said to continue the logical flow of the preceding lines, and Måns, after thinking for a minute or so, coming up with the line, with rhyming and everything. A bit like julklappsrim! I remember the feeeling of success, but today the lyrics partly seem like the result of some Bowiesque cut-up technique?

The song is centered around a riff in E minor to F, using open fifths. I still think the riff is pretty good, but these harmonies are difficult to write melodies to (unless you are Björk of course). Maybe that’s why the chorus is instrumental. The synth sound playing the riff is probably the closest we got to mimicking a classical analogue synth sound, before actually buying one. The D-20 was not a good synth to start learning about synthesis, since it is a confusing hybrid of a rompler and a digitally modelled analog synth. At this point we more and more ditched the sampled stuff and used only the synth part.

Another detail I remember is that I, after a lot of hard work tweaking the D-20, managed to come up with a percussive chipping sound similar to that in World In My Eyes by Depeche Mode. A complete ripoff!

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A song a week #11: The Dust On Your Floor

Olle is looking moody on a Stockholm back yard.

We’ve made it almost all the way through “In Fact” and the very last track of this cassette is a nice one. I think it gives quite a good insight into what is to come in the future, since it’s got more of a dark mood and classic synth-pop vibe to it.

It begins with the intro, which uses a lot of percussion sounds to create a moody landscape leading up to the timpani drumbeat.

This song is all Roland D-20, with some creative drum parts where we used the rim sound for once. But what’s really interesting here is the very sweet melody going in the bridge. We were always trying to combine nice melodies with a dark atmosphere and mood, and in this track it really paid off, I think.

The vocals sounds sort of forced, and they were recorded using a drum microphone, so there isn’t a lot of full vocal sound there to work with in the first place. There is nothing wrong with my singing, but the sound is very sharp and piercing.

After using our synthesizers separately all through “In Fact”, we were now learning how to hook them up to each other using MIDI. This would give us a whole new range of sounds to combine for our next cassette, “Nowadays” which had a lot of truly great tracks on it.

With this, we leave “In Fact” in the (quite literal) dust and move forward into the 1990’s! Next week, we start with a song that leads on “Nowadays” but is actually from the “In Fact” era. More on that soon!

A song a week #9: Tell Me Why

The whole gang during our first photo-shoot in 1989.
From left: Jonas Embring, Anders Ljung, Olle Söderström, Måns Jonasson.

Oh, yes! I’m so happy that it was my (Måns) turn to write this week. This is definitely one of the very best songs from In Fact, and I have very vivid memories of recording this song too.

“Tell me why” stands out as a great little pop ditty with, for Art Fact, very well-defined song structure. There is nothing hidden in this track, nothing left to the imagination or that could have been done that wasn’t done. Simplicity, pure pop. I love it! Of course, this is pretty far from synth-pop and I’d say that our influences from Erasure are very clear in this track.

This track is made with Roland D-20, although I am fairly certain that there was an earlier version made on the PSR-70, sadly gone today because it was probably never recorded. There are a couple of cute quantizing errors very typical for how we worked with the D-20, because we never knew if we should quantize in 1/16 or 1/32. Sometimes we did it wrong and there are a couple of off beats in this one.

The bass line is classic octaves, in a bouncy, sort-of slap bass sound. A weird choice maybe, but it works. One thing that is very different here is that we allowed Anders to add a GUITAR to the chorus. Again, I blame Erasure since Vince Clarke was dabbling with guitars at this time as well, at least in the “Sometimes” video, which we loved. I know that Anders doesn’t like that guitar sound any more, but I think it really works and blends in nicely.

Vocals then. The vocals are, in my own opinion, probably the best ones I recorded on In Fact. I did the recording in my bedroom in my parents’ home at Västmannagatan, and I remember that it was fairly late so my little sisters were sleeping and I sang so loud that my step-mother came to tell me to quit. Anyway, I got it done and today I still really like how they turned out. Blues-y, and really “on”. You need to remember that I was only 16 years old or so, which is the main reason I’m impressed today.

The lyrics are nothing special really. It’s all about rejection and not understanding why, in a teenage angst sort of way. The up-beat music doesn’t really match the lyrics.

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A song a week #7: Dig A Hole For Me

Anders outside our "studio" in the school Måns and Olle went to. — Anders outside our “studio” in the school Måns and Olle went to.

…

Oh boy.

This is quite akward. This song is really, really hard to listen to, since it really shows how young and silly we were. This is almost a novelty song, with stupid jokes and laughs throughout. If you can take listening to it, some of the details below might be interesting.

The bass line is the “fantastic” Yamaha PSR-70, the first machine Anders owned (I think) and I would borrow it, use the built-in very simple sequencer to write songs, and sometimes it would be impossible to find replacement sounds when we actually wanted to record the song. This bass sound is actually quite cool, I like it. The “strings” are also PSR-70 I believe! Other than PSR-70, the drums and sound effects are Roland D-20, and the bridge lead is most likely from Olle’s Casio CZ-101.

The lyrics are stupid. Something about wanting to die, but clearly not very serious, regardless of the message. The only part of the lyrics I like now are in the intro: “I searched for hours, days and for weeks. I know now my search was in vain.”

The vocals are good, as usual on In Fact. It’s easy to hear now why listeners were impressed by my vocals, as I had a very clear and distinct voice, being schooled in choir and opera. I think all of the backing vocals on this track are improvised during the recording, which is quite impressive, at least in the intro where it works quite well, even with the weird screaming at the very top.

OK, let’s stop this now. Next week we’ve got one of the best tracks from In Fact (at least in my opinion) so I’m looking forward to reading Anders’ writeup of that instead of this nonsense song.

/Måns

A song a week #5: As You Say

Art Fact live at Adolf Fredriks musikskola, 1990. — One of Art Fact’s very first live shows, in 1990. Anders behind the D-20 and Måns behind the microphone. Also pictured: totem pole!?

If “In Fact” had been a real album instead of a cassette demo, and if Art Fact had been on a major record label, the label might have pushed for a single before releasing the album. And if that would have been the case, my money is on “As You Say” as their choice for first single.

Why? This song is one of the most accessible and least “synth” songs we ever made. In fact, at one of our live shows we performed “As You Say” with just Anders on guitar and me singing, since “unplugged” was all the rage at the time. This song works well that way, but I think it also works pretty well as a little synthpop ditty.

Preparing for this post, Anders gave me two pointers. He said “One, the handclap should have only been there when there are no vocals” and “Two, the lead synth in the chorus is CRAZY loud in the mix”. I agree with both points, but it’s a little funny how bad we were at hearing these kind of things at the time. The chorus, with my “aaah”, reminds me of some song with Swedish artist Thomas di Leva, and that might have even been the inspiration for that part, since it’s very unlike our regular sound.

Once again, the trusty old Roland D-20 is alone on this track. The drums might be presets, in fact most of the sounds might be presets since this was a quite early production, and we had not really started messing around with the sounds too much yet. I like the sound, except maybe the bridges. They are quite boring. Obviously something more should have happened in the song/sound structure between verses. As it sounds now, all verses are identical, which is quite boring.

Bonus points to ourselves for the nice pizzicato sound in the verses and the cool intro. Those are the only two things that stand out to me now that I listen to it, production-wise.

The lyrics on this track I wrote as one of very few Art Fact songs that were based on a true story. I had in fact received a letter much like the one mentioned in the song, and my only possible response was to accept the letter and go on with my life. Very typical teen stuff though, and the lyrics are no masterpiece.

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A song a week #4: I’m Jealous

In-Fact

This week we’re taking the time machine back to 1989, and the quite interesting track “I’m Jealous” off of our “In Fact” cassette. This song is more or less a forgotten piece, made almost entirely around a single sound from the Roland D-20, which was the only piece of equipment used on this track.

The sound heard in the intro and throughout the song is probably a pitched-down percussion of some sort – this was during the time we were experimenting a lot with the sounds from the D-20 and trying to make it do things it really was not designed to do. The result was sometimes quite good – as in this case I think, where it does sound like something else.

Typically, for this time in Art Fact history, we are using only drums and one more sound for the verses. This left a lot of of space for my vocals, which were recorded through the Alesis Microverb with quite a long reverb. So 80’s, indeed.

There is not much else going on here – either lyrically or melodically. It sounds very dated and old in my ears today, and the only notable idea was the use of whispering in the repeating “I’m jealous” of the chorus. Also, that’s quite a scream at the end! I used to be very afraid of hurting my tender choir voice, so I’m surprised that I would scream like that. It’s all there though, raw as it was on the tape, just as raw today.

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