Breaking Down My New EP “y’all”

I’m beyond excited to be releasing my 5th EP titled “y’all”. Before I get into the track-by-track breakdown, I want to let you know that I will be donating 100% of the sales of this album to the great folx over at Mutual Aid Philly to assist them with their vital work. In such a strange and ever-challenging world, it’s awesome to know there are folx in my city doing such restorative and helpful work for the good of their neighbors and communities.

I’m gonna break down exactly what yr hearing in every song and explain the titles and general inspiration for each one below. We’ll start with a pic of my desktop setup, pedalboard/guitar, and my bass setup so you know where all these sounds come from:

Desktop: Arturia MicroFreak, Elektron Model:Samples, Yamaha QY-100, Empress Effects ZOIA (not used on this EP, surprisingly) that run into a Scarlett 18i8 (gen. 2) then into Reaper. There’s also a Kenton Thru-5 to sync everything for easier multi-tracking.

Guitar: Squier VM Mustang w/ upgraded Dominger Pickups and 11 gauge Ernie Ball Cobalt strings (I’m allergic to nickel).

Board: Boss TU-2 Tuner into BoredBrain Patchulator 8000 then the following pedals in various orders- EHX Pitch Fork pitch-shifter, Zoom MS-70CDR multi-effect, Malaise Forever Golden Guillotine distortion, Witchfinder Effects Quantum Vision multi-effect, Birmingham Sounds TWENTYSEVENTEEN overdrive, Little Bear Woolly Mammoth Clone fuzz, Chase Bliss Audio & Knobs Blooper looper, Boss DD-500 delay all leading into an EHX LPB-1 booster used as preamp and the Digitech CabDryVR. Those last two are always on.

Bass: Squier CV 70s Jazz Bass and Feelie’s Instruments Customized Epiphone P-Style Bass that are sometimes run into the big board or are run into the Digitech Turbo Flange flanger, Ibanez BB-9 Bottom Booster boost, Digitech Digidelay delay, and the Pinstripe Pedals LWDI DI box.

General Inspiration: “y’all” is my favorite word in the English language. It is an infinitely useful, kind, and fun word that has fully embedded itself in my daily language. I chose it as a title because 1. I thought it would be a funny thing for that skeleton to be saying and 2. I imagine myself saying it to all of you like “Y’all! I have these songs for you!” These songs also came from a desire to reconnect with my earlier loop based EPs and trying to capture their energy another time.

These songs are mostly the product of seeking out an entirely new workflow and finally realizing that I can allow Reaper to serve as the master clock for my setup. Every single sound was recorded on its own track, mostly in the form of mini-loops, affording me much more control over the panning, EQ, and effects applied to each sound. Every song has at least a little bit of Valhalla Supermassive, SketchCassette II, and Softube’s Saturation Knob and everything was mastered using Izotope Ozone Elements 9. I also wanna point out that I used Aberrant DSP’s ShapeShifter everywhere; I know SketchCassette is the big favorite from Aberrant but ShapeShifter is such a useful, flexible, crazy good tool that I had trouble keeping OFF tracks across this EP. Definitely get the bundle if yr going for SketchCassette.

Little Megapuppy: In “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” by Douglas Adams. (the second Hitchhikers Guide book), Zaphod Bebblebrox calls his great-great-grandfather/son to his assistance and he angrily calls him a “conceited little megapuppy”. I had the bones of this song completed when I read this and knew it was the right title: it just feels like whatever a little megapuppy would be hopping around, ears flapping and tail floating.

This song is built around the interaction between the dual QY-100 marimba lines and the glitchy pitched tom sounds sequenced on the M:S. Many of my songs come from an obsession with making songs based around simple groupings of notes that play off one another in fun ways. Here I had a great time mixing and matching the clusters of melody the M:S was serving up in contrast to the stagnant marimba line, all written without even hearing it and programming it while I was on the phone with my Mom. Thanks, Mom!

The glitchy bursts you hear at 1:12 in yr right ear is all Blooper. I looped myself doubling the marimba line with light OD from the TWENTYSEVENTEEN then “played” the stepped speed and stepped trimmer to get little freaked out variations on the line. For doing live-loop-mangling like this, it is absolutely impossible to beat Blooper (my RC-202 wishes it did these things this easily).

Penelope in the Big City: I can’t remember where this title came from but again, it just felt right. I imagine a very cute little person named Penelope visiting a city for the first time ever and being a bit scared but mostly in awe of the whole thing. Penelope is me when my Dad took me and my brother to NYC to see The Phantom Menace and the city was just so big and scary (SCARY BUILDINGS) yet fun and thrilling (PEOPLE IN COSPLAY OMG). The distorted part toward the end, I think, also captures that dichotomy: it’s loud and discordant but you can’t help but have wide anime eyes at the whole thing.

This is yet another Blooper track: everything you hear for the first ten seconds aside from the fading MicroFreak arp (a 10 step sequence inspired by Andrew Huang’s recent video about polyrhythm/polymeter) is the same exact loop played at different speeds by Blooper. Can other loopers do this? Certainly. Are other loopers as cute as Blooper? Nope. Just nope.

Deep in the mix is another M:S oddity: watery, liquidy, super weirdo hi-hats with ultra quick random pitch modulation. Each track is a few different samples played on all 16 steps with that modulation tossing it all over the place, making for highly textured sounds to give yr ears little treats to snack on way in the back.

Then the huge part comes in: two hard-panned guitars with Pitch Fork at 50% blend octave down, Golden Guillotine pushing 100% on both the pre and post knobs for its biggest possible distortion sounds, TWENTYSEVENTEEN with a nice biting trebly OD on one and bass heavy OD on the other, then a bit of reverb from the Quantum Vision. Bass is the J-Bass into the GG with a bit of hi-cut from the Tone knob and some heavy, gritty fuzz from the Little Bear clone. MicroFreak string style pads round out the heavy wall of sound but I think it’s the swooping eBow arp the really makes it pop: I literally put my guitar on the ground, put the eBow on the strings, then let one of my Thermae-style patches on the DD-500 take care of the rest (watch this Cloud Professor vid to learn how I made that).

The drums in this section are the M:S run into the MS-70CDR on a patch called “RingNoise” which is the LoFi Delay used as a bit-crusher with some of its own vinyl noise simulation into a lo-fi-ish EQ patch. Without those drums this part sounds boring and small but that harsh SCRSSH sound of the open hat really helps to make the guitars and pads feel huger.

Last Night’s Rice: Me and my wife make big batches of rice at least once a week and that always means we’re gonna have fried rice the next day. Fried rice day is always a good day so last night’s rice is always a good thing. The little flicks and twists in the melodies reminded me of how the rice and eggs jump and pop as they cook.

This is another Model:Samples driven song with a woodblock being pitch modulated to create a sort of arp-like sequence that I recorded in multiple keys to get the progression going throughout the song. The M:S really encourages you to twist knobs and try non-standard sample manipulation with its many knobs and I constantly find quirky little lines like these ones that can drive whole songs. I imagined it as a video game tune with the kitschy tom fills at the end of each line and the relatively simplistic, bubbly structure.

The QY-100 is what takes this song to a new level. When you hit the middle section with the MicroFreak solo (I love gliding synth melodies like this one and the one in Little Megapuppy) you also get a new pad sound which is a choir-ish patch from the QY. I don’t care that 300-400 of the 500-ish sounds in this little machine are kinda cheesy or unusable because sometimes you stumble on ones like this that just FIT and you can use the bare-bones VCO controls to make those patches fit almost anywhere you need them. The QY then fills out the end of the song with some high pads overlaid on the MicroFreak pads reused from the beginning to bring the song to its triumphant end.

Yaknow?: If you ever find yrself texting me or talking to me online, you’ll notice some shorthand I tend to use a lot including “yr”, “folx”, and another all-time favorite “yaknow”. I end probably 50% of my thoughts with that phrase simply because it’s the simplest way to indicate to someone that I wanna know they get what I’m saying and that’s exactly why it’s the last song title here: it’s me re-hashing things from throughout this EP and my entire catalog to make sure that y’all are following what I’m doing, yaknow?

The DD-500 has top notch tape delay and this entire song stems from me wanting to show that off. There are two instances of it here with one playing slower, highly degrading repeats and the other with faster repeats and an EQ effect making it all lo-fi and textured. If any piece of gear makes you wanna build a song around how good it sounds while yr in the shower, you should get that piece of gear.

This one also features a MicroFreak arp and a high, slowly gliding lead toward the end and I once again depend heavily on “real” sounds from the QY-100. Glockenspiels and marimbas dot the middle of the song but I’m most proud of the crazy, ultra-fast E-Piano then regular Piano lines that come in. Sequencing on the QY can be confusing but the whole machine seems to be built for happy mistakes. I set it to step-sequencer mode then just punched in a bunch of in-key fast notes, hit play, and BOOM I have an impossibly speedy bass part playing on the bottom of my bridge. I wanted to make sure I fit some of the old-school-MIDI piano sounds somewhere on this EP so I copy-pasted the part I just wrote and switched it to a Piano two octaves up and it just filled out any part of the spectrum I had left.

I think that’s about everything. If there are any sounds or ideas that you want me to write more about or explore further just let me know and I’ll happily do so. I hope you enjoy the EP as I had a ton of fun making it. It’s so nice to feel so free and invigorated by a setup and I hope this description has shown just how much the gear drives the music for me.