See Me Stop
See Me Stop is the oldest song that will be on Meeting of Minds, the album I’m about to release. It features vocalist Dusky Diana. Several years ago when I was first getting into house music, I decided I wanted to try making a house song. I think I started by trying to figure out a good bpm. I was still very new to house and I didn’t know what I know now about some of the technical stuff, so I ended up with a rough estimate somewhere around 138bpm, which was way too fast. Around the same time, Nina Simone’s Sinnerman was very popular on my playlist.
As I write this, more is coming back to me. I remember riding home either on the 42 or 21 bus thinking about my house song. I decided I wanted to make it ridiculously happy and optimistic yet lyrically simple. As I got off the bus and stopped at the 24 hour grocery store on the way home, the words and tune came to me:
I’ve been climbing so long.
The years have come and gone.
I’m nowhere near the top,
But I won’t stop.
I got home and began working on the music. I forget the order I did the parts in since it was so long ago, but my guess is that I laid down the drums first. I played around with the keyboard and came up with a piano part that captured some of what I love about the piano in Sinnerman. It is dull sounding, somewhat far back in the mix, very repetitive, and almost jumbled sounding. I did it in the key of C Sharp major which is now one of my favorite keys though I don’t think I’ve used it a whole lot. I got the basic structure down and recorded myself singing the words so I wouldn’t forget the tune.
Not long after that, I was hanging out in the Crimson Moon talking to a new friend. She mentioned that she did some singing, so I asked if she’d be interested in coming by to work on the song. I think I might have played her the rough version. She agreed, we set up a time, and we met up. She came early in the morning, so we went to the coffee shop on the corner and had coffee before we got started. I had written the four lines above with a specific tune, and that was it. I told her that first I wanted those lines sung the way I had written them and then she could add words, adlib, and harmonize however she liked. I wanted the song to have a build up, so it needed to be understated in the beginning. Ms. Dusky didn’t look like she quite understood what I wanted, but she gave it a try. What she was singing wasn’t what I wanted, so we stopped several times. Eventually I could see that she was getting frustrated, so I asked her to sit down and attempted to explain it to her again. This time it made sense to her. I could see in her face when it clicked.
She got up and started singing again. This time it was completely different. She did exactly what I wanted and the energy was perfect. After we got that first part down, it was time for her to add her flavor. It was amazing to experience. Ms. Dusky would have me play up to a certain point, then she’d ask me to loop it. She would play around with different ideas for a few minutes, then she’d say, “ok, record.” I’d record it, then we’d repeat that process. Before I knew, there were a bunch of new vocal parts and they all had multiple layers.
Thinking about it now, I guess that session set the tone for my current production style. I do not consider music done if I haven’t heard the vocals yet. The music can and probably should change once the vocals are recorded. After recording Ms. Dusky, the different parts she had come up with inspired me to make changes to the music. About halfway through the song, there is a part where all the instruments drop out except for a piano and a sub-bass sound and the piano plays a new part. That whole section came about because of the way she sang the lines that now go along with it.
After the recording session, I had to put the song together. I had to figure out where which parts of the music should do what and which vocal parts should go where. From the beginning, I had no intentions of keeping the vocals where she’d sang them. The aim of the recording session was to make building blocks, so afterwards, the large task of building something remained. Its strange to look back on the process. I didn’t have a lot of the knowledge or resources then that I have now. I did a lot of things the hard way. For example, there is a sustained note in one part that I wanted to fade into the back. I decided it should start relatively dry, then the echo on it should gradually increase. At the time I didn’t know that this was a common technique normally used to make fadeouts sound more natural or to give music a more dynamic sound. I also didn’t know that with audio editors better than what I was using at the time, I could simply automate the reverb to gradually increase at the proper time. Instead I made a separate track with a separate copy of the same sustained note but with tons of reverb. Through trial and error, I found the right amount to fade out the dry track and fade in the reverb track to get the effect I wanted.
See Me Stop was full of such examples of ‘the hard way’ but somehow, it worked. My skill at mixing was definitely not what it is now. Songs that I did after that one were not mixed properly. I think its because of the amount of time I put into it. See Me Stop was finished months after I recorded Ms. Dusky’s parts. I believe it was still warm outside when we recorded it. It wasn’t until February of the next year that I met up with her to give her a copy of the final version.
You can hear See Me Stop on my website in the downloads section.
