This is the 2nd edit of this track - the original demo was a bit messy with too much reverb on the hook, so I've cleaned it up and fine-tuned the vocals a bit.

So Far

I started this track after having an idea for a hook for a while - I couldn't get it out of my head so I spent some time trying to find the right melody to back it up, I ended up going with this simple loop, it's heaps more 'uplifting' than what I usually make, so it was actually fun to do something a bit more light-hearted :)


James Dean

Heard the original track on the radio today while working on something else. I really loved the melody on the verse, and I just decided to have a go at it. At first, I thought that I'd have a go at a dubstep remix, but the tempo ended up at 115bpm when I pitched it up so I just went with that, not really worrying about genre. I'm in Vienna right now so I don't have a keyboard or even many VSTs - this was all done on the laptop with Cubase SX3, the prepackaged synths + Z3TA and a mouse. That restricts me a lot but sometimes that can be good, it forces you to work within limitations. I've spent about 5 hours on it and I'm reasonably pleased with the results.


Peter Gabriel - In Your Eyes (Jacob Giles Remix)

Still in Berlin, don't really have a full studio but enough to make tracks (pc, cubase, mic & a keyboard). I haven't made any beats in ages but had a Friday night spare so went through some old tracks I'd labelled for sampling. 

I found a track that had a really upbeat sound but some cool guitar, and I started slicing it up, repitching elements and rearranging the melody, and after about 30 mins I found something cool. Then Cubase froze, so I lost it, lol. Anyway, I remembered mainly what the theme was so went back and did it all again, and then just started sketching out the track. 

I haven't written lyrics for ages and honestly this track was a real pain - 48 bars of raps took about 10 hours on and off of writing, and I'm still 50 / 50 on it, but I just decided to go hard and let the flow dictate the lyrics. 

At first I was looking for a hook, but I decided to go through Youtube for some samples, and found some neat stuff with this guy doing exorcisms, so I grabbed a couple of samples from there and let the middle 8 just do its thing as a bridge between the verses. 

The Exorcism

I hadn't made a track in a while, but woke up at 8am on a Saturday with a melody in my head, so just started working on it - I didn't have a fleshed out vision of what it would turn out like, but followed the groove.  

Front to back it took around 9 hours of production, but writing the second verse was a struggle - making beats is definitely the easiest part for me. 

No samples in this one, just synths, programmed beats and tuned vocals.

Lyrics:

Chorus)

Let these buildings fall / watch them wash away / 
maybe after all / there'll be hell to pay
we're wicked

Verse 1.) 

I must be wicked can't get no sleep / winter coming can't get no heat / 
Come on Karma, comma, gecko feet / dreaming of the summer, yes so bleak / 
Tried to find God with a spotlight - no luck - all I saw was just a drop of dust in my blindspot / 
Should I do this white bag of dust? fuck it why not, U-bahn, don't stop puffing till the line stop / 
Bubonic plague, electronic rage, robotic made, a new kind of slave /
Futures coming on strong a new kind of day / tell me where it's gone wrong, new type of game /
I'm a villian, I'm a demon, I'm a creep, I'm a virus for your mind let me fire & repeat / 
I'm a ghost in the shell / running blind on the beachhead shells crashing down on my head to the beat 

Verse 2.) 

I know I'm wicked I can feel it in my chest / heart shooting through my rib cage bullet-proof vest / 
Yes, I know I'm wicked cause I just can't rest / wide awake in my bed, feeling so so /
C.R.E.A.M. let's go, get me sweating for your fresh breath of pheremone / still stepping on that Excel treadmill / 
sitting at my desk for that next hit of methadone / 
Avarice and fake sand, tracing crazy eights and dam about to break make a paradise a wasteland / 
I must be wicked I just want more things while a poor man bows for a warlord king / 
Tantrums for Tantalum, iPhones and cameras, ozone contaminants, cocaine & cannabis / 
I fear the animal man, the most venomous, man the new cannibal, chant the old Testament /
Must be wicked took a tusk from the elephant, a fin from a hammerhead, the heart of the Amazon / 
We must be wicked took the fur from the antelope, the teeth from the lion we the beasts out of Babylon /  

Wicked

First draft reference for Loke. Literally no mixing + using stock Cubase sounds. 62bpm B flat major.

Loke Theme

Haven't made a track in ages, found a nice little sample in a random track I came across and started playing around with it. Only using Cubase Elements and stock drums, pretty simple and straight forward. Might rap to it or get someone to have a go at putting a verse on it. Took around 2 hours total, didn't stress too much over this one.

Today

My Soul

It's been a while since I've spent some solid time on a track, feels good. This started when I down-pitched the bass from a different track I was working on, I like the sound and started mucking about. At first it was an instrumental, pretty synth heavy, with a 130bpm drum pattern, but after a while I started playing around with simple vocals and layered these vox really quickly, just 3 parts on the main and 4 on the follow, no hook really, just for texture. There's this 'italo' bass that is quite bouncy, and in a couple of parts I really strip back the track to just that bass, the drums and the vocal, quite different to what I normally do (which is layer like 50 things at once!). Unlike most tracks I make, I also left in mistakes to keep the sound 'organic', and let mistakes guide some of the edits that I made. As per usual, when I'm in the zone I forgot to eat. 

Cosmopolis

Many software instruments were harmed in the making of this track. It started on a friday night, playing around with some synth sounds, and after a couple of hours I had a strange little house loop that I liked but wasn't really going anywhere. Saturday morning I woke up with fresh inspiration and started putting vocals down. After a day of editing and chopping beats, adding instruments, I had half a track but wasn't really convinced by it. On sunday, after a nice sleep-in I came back to it with fresh ears and started a rough mix, fine-tuned the vocals and spent more time getting the overall arrangement right. So far, I think it's got some spark but it may need another arrangement to get the most out of it, and I'm also thinking of a live electric guitar to provide a different foundation on the chorus...I made more of an effort to remember to eat and drink this time;)

Daylight

When the recent Boston bombings took place I looked to Reddit, 4Chan, Flickr and Twitter for news and vision - mainstream media outlets were literally hours behind. Through Reddit came a set of police scanners from Boston; the ability to listen to what was happening on the streets during the - for lack of a better word - action. I feel that this incident signals an important turning point in news, police-work, information sharing and public security. Was Reddit always right? No. Did people on 4Chan make mistakes? Yes. Nonetheless, this was a spontaneous, self-organizing collective of tens of thousands of people working on a common cause in real-time. That's big. 

I digress. In the aftermath, there was the question of whether all of this attention upon the suspects was beneficial - what if someone craves the attention and, as a result, commits a similar crime purely in anticipation of becoming the center of the first world's attention for 15 minutes? What if the next Columbine happens because the perpetrators want to make the front page of Reddit? That's what Nine O'Clock News is about. 

This is a second take of the track with new vocals - feedback from the first version is that the rap vox were too chilled and didn't really fit the track, so I went a lot harder on this second version. Added a few more edits and removed a lot of mess from the bass while I was at it. 3 days from being kicked out of Berlin...

Nine Oclock News

Experience / Music
Input / Output
Drums / Bass
Voice / Synthesizer
Jacob / Giles


jacobgilesmusic

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