music and lyrics © 2019 by colin nicholls
I wanted a simple and short acapella piece to introduce the collection. Yes, this is kind of an homage to Rick Wakeman's No Earthly Connection but I hope it is also its own thing.
I've often thought that audio CDs should include the "THX Sound" which apart from sounding cool, is actually designed to allow the theatre to ensure that the audio levels and frequency EQ is set correctly for the entire programme to follow.
There are three vocal parts, with two tracks each, for a total of six voices. I recorded several takes of each part, and took the best two bits of each to make up the final mix. I have a tendancy to sing flat, so I confess there were a couple of places I used V-Vocal to lift the pitch of a sustained note, slightly.
These six tracks are stereo panned and then then directed to a "VOX" bus with a BREVERB instance defining the acoustic space. This "VOX" bus is split to two separate destination busses: one "CLEAN", and the other "DIRTY" with an instance of Nectar 2 providing bandpass filtering and downsampling for a "broken amplifier" sound.
I also have a separate track with a sample of "vinyl record needle drop and noise" directed to the "dirty" bus.
Both "CLEAN" and "DIRTY" busses are fed to the main output bus, and a volume automation envelope on each is used to cross-fade between them.
It seems a shame to crud up the first part of the track but it does express the "upgrade" process quite nicely.
We present you with this upgrade
It has features you should have
Security and fewer defects
Protection through Autonomy