Some Say Love

Horns And Groove And Vocals, Oh My!

This year, July 1st brings Canada Day celebrations, and coincidentally, a new mothershout track called Some Say Love.

It’s on Spotify and on YouTube.

It’s big, it’s bold, it’s brassy. And yes, the retro artwork is intentional, to match the whole retro vibe of the song. Or at least, that’s what I was going for.

When I start work on a track, I create a Google document for it, to hold all the notes and lyrics and harmony experiments. The first thing I wrote for this was BIG BIG IN YOUR FACE, to try and stay focused on the dynamics and sound I wanted. When I’m working on a track, it’s too easy to spiral into tiny details and lose sight of the destination, so I gave myself a signpost that showed up every time I opened the document.

Rules

As well as the General Rules for mothershout, I give myself some new ground rules for every track (I could say “creative constraints”, but that would be a bit pretentious). For this song, they were:

• Achieve something like an early 1970s sound.

• A big, in-your-face chorus.

• Mid-tempo; at least 130bpm.

• Use two interlocking pulses for the rhythm (more on this below).

• Use a horn section.

• Should make you want to move!

I think it ended up more or less where I wanted it to be.

Origins

I’ve had the chorus (some say loooooove… ) in my head for a few years, but I couldn’t come up with anything for the rest of the song. Then one day I was tinkering around on the piano, playing Irving Berlin’s Top Hat White Tie And Tails¹ (Spotify, YouTube). and got interested in the melody for the line stepping out my dear to breathe an atmosphere / that simply reeks with class (or if you click the YouTube link, you’ll hear it immediately, starting the overture). In Top Hat it’s a set of descending groups of three notes, played with a rhythm that shifts the emphasis from the first note to the second to the third as it descends. Fun to play… and it inspired the start of the verse melody of this song. I changed the rhythm to all equal notes, and offset it to suit the words. In Top Hat it’s over either a descending chromatic bassline or the I and V chords; in this song it’s always over the Im chord.

A couple of days later, I played the verse melody a few times before going to bed, went to sleep and woke up with the satellites are falling from the sky / but we don’t even wonder why in my head, and that kicked off the rest of the song.

Generally, I have a clear idea of what a song is about when I’m writing lyrics, though sometimes that emerges as I write and rewrite them. In this case, I still don’t really know what the song is about, except that:

• The verses mention some kind of alien stuff going on, but the singer is more concerned with day-to-day life (getting to work, grocery store running out of cheese, etc).

• In the last verse, the singer talks about a trip to Mars and why they came so far, which might suggest she’s on Mars.

• The choruses were written by Googling for quotes people have said about love, and rewriting them so that they rhyme and scan. So yes, some people do say those kinds of things about love; it’s better kept away from the light. My favourite is some say love is angry and it’s going to bite. Because it can bite.

Also, the line my bodega’s running out of cheese was originally just a bit of nonsense thrown in as a placeholder, but I kept it because it makes me laugh. There’s an alien invasion! Yeah, but I need my queso blanco…

A general rule of mothershout is that it (they? I?) should sound like a band playing together. To try and get that effect here, I recorded many of the parts twice. First I’d do a guide part, good enough to play along with, but definitely not the final version. Then, once the song had all the parts, I re-recorded the bass, all the guitars and the electric piano, as though I were playing along with the rest of a band. That subtly changes the way you play, as if you’re bouncing ideas off other musicians and responding to what they’re playing.

The solos were the last to be done, because I think a good solo has to build on the rest of the song, referencing the melodies and motifs from it, and that’s best done when the song is close to completion. I wrote a bit more about the solos below in the music-theory geeky part of this post.

Harmony & More Music Theory Geeking Out

This song is in B minor. Ish. Kinda sorta. Everything revolves around a Bm chord, and the chord progression keeps jumping away and returning to it (which is, of course, what chord progressions do).

The verse starts on Bm, and stays there for three and a half measures before a C7 appears (just after we don’t even wonder why). What is a C7 doing in a B minor song?

One way (my way) to think about this is that it’s a tritone substitute for B minor’s normal V chord, which is F#7. C7 is a tritone (three steps, or three tones) away from F#7, so we call it a tritone substitution.

But, you might say, F#7 is F# A# C# E and C7 is C E G Bb. Why can you substitute C7 for F#7?

Well, they’re both dominant seventh chords, meaning that they’re unstable² and want to resolve somewhere. Both contain the leading tone of B minor (A#, which is the same note as Bb). And I feel like C7 want to resolve back to Bm even more than F#7 does, because three of its notes are only a half step away from notes in Bm (C and Bb are each a half step away from B, and G is a half step away from F#). It yearns to resolve.

Tritone substitutions are a great jazz trick to avoid using the conventional old V chord, though they can sound bizarre in some styles of music. Here I think the song is jazzy enough to handle it. That C7 shows up in several places, playing the same role of an unstable chord that might be looking for a fight.

Another way to think about that chord is that it’s a bII (a flat second) chord, just a half-step above the home chord of Bm. There’s a reason that black metal bands use flat-second chords so much; they have that kind of lurking menace sound. The theme from Jaws is built around the same sound; a half-step up. But here I’m combining it with a much more upbeat sound, to take some of the sinister away.

The first half of the verse (we know it’s just / another working day) ends with Bº (B diminished, under the just) and G7 (under another working). Neither of those are in B minor, so what are they doing here?

The first part of the answer is that they’re almost the same chord. Bº is B D F, and G7 is G B D F; any dominant 7 chord contains a diminished chord rooted on its third. I put the diminished chord there to bridge the jump between Bm and G7.

The second part of the answer is… more complicated. Basic music theory would suggest³ that I would use the V7 chord of B minor (F#7) instead of G7. Moving away from the Im to the V7 chord is about the simplest progression you can write. One common jazz-ish way to do that move to the V7 chord is via a secondary dominant (another dominant 7 chord a fourth below it). For example, Im II7 V7, which would be Bm C#7 F#7 for this song. And if we do the same tritone substitution trick on that II7 (C#7) we get… G7. Which would make it (deep breath) a tritone substitution of a secondary dominant.

Yeah, me neither.

A much simpler explanation is to think of the G7 as the plain old sixth chord of B minor, but with a dominant 7th thrown in to add flavour. And if that’s still too much, you can also think of the G7 as just a groovy sounding unstable dominant chord that wants to resolve somewhere.

At the end of the verse, the last two chords are F#7 (under nothing’s real) and then E7 (under here’s the deal). Why E7? Because it’s unstable (it’s a dominant 7 chord) and contains the root and third of Bm (B D), so it resolves back to Bm nicely. Or so I think. Although, when the chorus starts, there’s an implied V (F#) chord (under some say) so maybe the E7 is just a IV that moves back to Im via the V.

One of my favourite bits of the song is that long F# augmented seventh chord under the line it’s all just sand. The electric piano plays a little ascending whole-tone-scale arpeggio over it, rather like the piano over the second chord of Stevie Wonder’s You Are The Sunshine Of My Life (Spotify, Youtube). I have a thing for augmented chords, especially with a dominant seventh added, and I’ll sneak them in wherever I can.

The chorus, in contrast, is pretty simple. Bm and E/B; in chord numbering, Im and IV. On the third line, it moves to E and then E7/D on the way back down to Bm. Under the line and some say lovers it moves down to G7, which is dramatically playing the role of the V chord (as in the verse), so it’s essentially a blues Im IV Im V progression with a twist of lime and salt.

Arrangement

Horns

One of the Rules that I set myself for this track was to write and arrange a major horn part. Horns (as the jazz cats say) are brass instruments, and writing for them is challenging if you do it realistically, because you have to think about allowing the players time to breathe, the ranges of different instruments and which instruments to choose for your horn section.

To get into the right headspace for this, I listened to a whole bunch of classics with good horn parts; lots of Earth, Wind And Fire and Stevie Wonder, plus a wide selection of anything with horns that Quincy Jones produced. I also found a really good 4-part article from Sound On Sound magazine on arranging for brass, well worth reading if you’re at all interested in writing and arranging for horns.

Quoted in that article, Wayne Jackson of The Memphis Horns sums up a key principle of horn arranging as don’t step on the singer, meaning don’t play at the same time as the lead vocals. This is excellent advice. You might notice that there are places in this song where the horns play very much at the same time as the singers, and that’s completely intentional, in a learn the rules and then break them kind of way.

In the verses, the horns punctuate the vocals, by popping up between the singers’ lines. In the chorus, the horns change roles to be more like background vocals (and they match the actual background vocal lines) to fill out the sound. This isn’t stepping on the singer, it’s supporting them.

Not Horns

The other thing I wanted to do in this arrangement was have two interlocking pulses. A pulse is the basic rhythm of the song; it defines which beats are emphasized (or hit).

Think of each bar of this song as eight beats (eighth notes). The snare drum hits are on beats 3 and 7: One two three four five six seven eight. The bold numbers are the beats where the snare drum hits.

• The right-hand guitar, bass guitar and kick drum are playing a pulse that hits on beats 1 and 4 (and sometimes 7). The pattern is One two three four five six seven eight.

• The left-hand guitar hits on 3 and 6: One two three four five six seven eight.

Having the two guitars hitting on different beats means that there’s a sort of bounce from right to left and back again through the verse. It’s also there in the chorus but the electric piano fills it out by playing a riff that hits on 1, 3, 4 and 6 to combine the two pulses. I like how it ended up.

That Solo

Yeah, it’s 2023, and guitar solos are so Last Century. But I like them, and I knew I wanted this track to feel like a 1970s (or 1960s) band playing live, so we have a solo. In fact, I think of this track as having two solos, because the first is referencing the verse (and is played with a kinda twangy tremolo sound) and the second is referencing the chorus (and cranks up the overdrive sound).

The first solo closely follows the verse vocal melody, with some extra ornamentation. I originally played it with the verse melody as a placeholder until I thought of something better, but it’s such a damn fun jazzy line to play that when I listened back I knew it was going to stay. I especially wanted to have the third line’s melody (sung on the lines we know it’s just another working day and but my bodega’s running out of cheese) to make it stand out. A brass riff in the song Ghost Town by The Specials (Spotify, Youtube) uses the same trick of moving from the root note of a chord to the fifth and then down to a restless #4; it’s a nice way to express a kind of menacing sound. I added the brass part that follows it to emphasise it even more.

The second solo is loosely based on the chorus melody and harmony, but fights against it all the way. I’m not the sort of guitarist who can improvise something right in the moment. I have to sit back and think and design a solo, experimenting with different ideas over and over and picking what fits together. In this case I spent about five minutes noodling about to figure out some chord shapes and then just turned up and went for it. Five takes, and what I kept was nearly all the last take. It’s my favourite solo I’ve ever played.

The Instruments

The horns in this song are played by two virtual instruments:

• EastWest Sounds’ Hollywood Pop Brass provides the top trumpet line. And nothing else. The one good thing about HPB is that the trumpet has real punch. Apart from that… I am not a fan. I don’t like the Opus player that EastWest use, or the limited set of usable articulations in HPB. I got it at a discount price and I still slightly regret the purchase.

• Native Instrument’s Session Horns Pro. This is not a cheap product, but it’s a real pleasure to play with and use. The sounds are beautifully recorded and the software has some truly useful features, like the Smart Voice Split that will “intelligently” assign chord notes to instruments, and gave me good help with the arrangement. The only downside is that it’s tricky to get any “punch” from it, but combining it with the HPB trumpet solved that.

The electric piano is my trusty Modartt Pianoteq modelled piano. Electric piano and horns go so well together (Kool And The Gang’s Jungle Boogie is a fine example), and I also think it’s is a classic early 1970s instrument.

For this track, I tried out a new virtual drum instrument; these are IK Multimedia’s MODO Drums. Like Pianoteq, these are modelled, not sampled. Sampled instruments play back recordings of real instruments, but modelled instruments generate the sound “live” using mathematical algorithms to “model” how a real instrument would respond to being played. I think there’s an extra level of realism with modelling, though to be fair, it’d be pretty difficult to tell the difference when listening to the whole track. Unless you’re a complete musical geek, like me.

The guitars are all real, and they’re run through Scuffham Audio’s S-Gear virtual amplifiers. I’ve played with many different virtual guitar amps over the years, and S-Gear is the best I’ve found; sounds great, easy to configure, and with really good usable preset sounds that work in a mix. The electric guitar is an Epiphone Dot, and the bass is a Squier Mini-P.

And as usual, the vocals are done with Dreamtonic’s wonderful Synthesizer V. The lead voice is Eclipsed Sound’s Solaria, with Dreamtonic’s Natalie providing a subtle upper harmony. The four background singers are Solaria again, and Dreamtonic’s Natalie, Kevin and Weina.

The Mix

The mixing process that I learned starts with what’s called a static mix; you get the track to sound as good as possible using only volume (turning instruments up and down) and panning (moving instruments left and right around in the stereo space). For a whole bunch of technical reasons, panning can be tricky if the instrument sounds are already in stereo. Stereo sounds are spread out, and tend to get in each other’s way.

On the last release, A Zero For A Heart, I tried out using several of the instruments in mono, and it really helps with panning. On this track, all the instruments are mono (except the drums) and that made it easier to place them in the stereo image without them getting too mixed together.

There’s one trick that worked well, and is worth geeking out about. Both the horns and the electric piano are mono sounds placed on one side of the stereo image, and then the other side has a duplicate of the sound put through a tiny delay, a tiny pitch-shift and a small change in EQ. Those changes are enough to make two duplicates of one mono sound like two parts played almost identically together, and keeps them more-or-less balanced in stereo.

Once I had a good static mix, I refined it using a basic rule of adding only the minimum amount of processing that I could get away with. Because I was going for a retro sound of a band playing together, I wanted to avoid the super-clear and perfectly adjusted sound of a modern track.

1. Fred Astaire sang this in the 1935 film Top Hat. You probably didn’t see it in movie theatres, I’m guessing.

2. Stable chords don’t feel like they need to move somewhere else. Unstable chords have added notes that make them feel tense and unsettled and want to change to another chord.

3. Suggest, not say, because music theory tries to describe how music works, but doesn’t define it. There are no real rules, just tools to help us talk about musical stuff. Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.