The Knife - AndyR Original

[Gary F]

 Fantastic song!!!! Your lead licks remind me of Mark Knopfler!!
Awesome vox!!! There are many great songs on this site but, this one and Sleeping with the ghost are in a class all their own at the top of the list!!!!! And that is saying a lot!!!!!

Gary

[AndyR]

I've got another secret - I was a bit disappointed with this recording after Sleeping With The Ghost

I am actually VERY fond of The Knife, but for different reasons. It's always been one of my favourites, but I know from back in the 90s that it seems to divide people. Some absolutely love the story, same as I do, it's got this black humour to it... others seem put off by that side of it.

So I was a bit disappointed that it didn't come out as roundedly "wonderful" as SWTG did. I was stuck working on this, listened to SWTG again, and nearly binned this one as a "try again one day"

But I realised, while I was struggling with the mix, that it's just not as "good" a song as SWTG - "good" as in all-round and wide appeal. That's all it is, SWTG almost recorded itself - once you know how to sing it, it's not that difficult to get it sounding good.

Some songs take an awful lot to mess up, others you have to work hard to get a "performance" out of them.

So I realised that with this one I had to change the approach to try and bring out some of the resigned grit and black humour - that's what this song has for as appeal, at least for me, anyway. I proceeded to add some crisper guitar parts and spent several hours hitting things to produce a percussion track.

All in all, it got closer, and then last night, hacking into the EQs, it got even closer. I still wasn't 100%, but I decided to post - kind of "hang it out there" and see what people thinks...

So I'm very encouraged by the comments so far - thanks folks! It kind of helps me for future recordings

Ted, I like that style too - I seemed to use it an awful lot in the early 90s, which is why I'm plundering the box of songs for recordings. But then it seems to have deserted me when I was in my next band in the late 90s... divorce might have had soemthing to do with it...

Anyway I've not been able to find out exactly how I did it back then (as in, I've not been able to repeat it since starting to make music again in the last few years!)

Oh, finally, no one else has mentioned them in this thread yet... this is from my Jethro Tull phase, perhaps that's where the narrative style comes from.... Mebbe I ought to get them Tull CDs out again!

[Satchwood]

Wow great song ~ luv it!!  Fantastic guitar and key changes, which really adds some cool buildup & intense vibes!  There's something subliminal that says "play me again" ;~)

[AndyR]

Wow great song ~ luv it!!  Fantastic guitar and key changes, which really adds some cool buildup & intense vibes!  There's something subliminal that says "play me again" ;~)

That just reminds me of something else I did with this one. I knew it had to "build", and it needed to breath a bit on the tempo front. But after the problems I had with SWTG and no click, and I knew these verses had to be quite "tight", I knew I had to use a click...

So I bit the bullet and learnt how to do a tempo map. It goes up 1 beat per minute at the start of every verse, and halfway through every verse. And then it slows down every bar or two on the last reprise... So the intro and outro are the same speed, I think, but different keys (because it goes up a semi-tone each verse).

[Blooby]

I'm sure I'll have folks disagree, but I actually hear Bruce Dickinson (from Iron Maiden and not the "More Cowbell" skit). The delivery is especially similar in the phrasing of "plunged it in her breast" part or something to that effect.

Great tune and great production.

Blooby

[AndyR]

I was actually listening to Live After Death when I was doing the ironing before I started this recording... oops!

(also it's the one bit of the vocal where the timing isn't quite right... it might be the vocal, or it might be the bass, I did the vocal without the bass, but it's the vocal that sounds rushed to me)

[Ferryman]

Andy, this is another superb piece of songwriting, playing and production. Your vocal performance is fantastic, the guitar playing is top notch and the arrangement and structure of the song is great, nice little key change and superb guitar parts.

I really like the narrative structure here (and also in SWTG). You have a prog rock style here (in the storytelling) coupled with a more modern musical style and I really like that. I suspect that as you are a similar age to me that prog rock from the 70s has wormed its way inside you and reveals itself in the way you approach some of your music. I like that a lot, and I certainly got some Jethro Tull from this alhough I couldn't really categorize the musical style.

The production sounds great to me, those glitches you are hearing aren't noticeable to me. I know what you mean about this compared to SWTG. That just oozes awesomeness, and there is such subtlety and depth in your vocal treatments on that song it would be hard to match with anything else (perhaps that was why you left the backing vox out?). Also, this is a very similar style of song so it's hard not to compare them. This is an excellent song but SWTG is quite special. I think if you had done something else in between you wouldn't have felt the same way, but coming to The Knife from SWTG, and having one go so well while the other was a struggle, is going to make you compare them (perhaps unfavourably).

I think these are both great examples of a particular musical style of yours and would sound great together on an album. They are both really strong pieces of work in their own right. Magnificent stuff, and thanks for more production notes on the SWTG thread.

Cheers,

Nigel

[OsCKilO]

Freaking Amazing Andy!!!!!


This is a song that will go on the mp3 player....

And a thread that I am Gonna study...

Thanks for printing your Production Tips!
They are amazing!!!

[AndyR]

Thanks guys

After posting last night, I listened to this back-to-back with SWTG and, um... soundwise, this one is better! Phew, that's a relief... some sort of improvement then!... (my wife says "different" but, like you, she hasn't heard what the parts of SWTG actually sound like underneath)

I might actually follow my own production tips.

What it does mean is that I could seriously improve the sound of SWTG by remixing it using the same techniques I used here (and getting the vocal processing, er, actually right!!) - the basic tracks are all the same quality and voicing as on this one. The difference is in the EQ-ing and compression of sub-mixes during mixing and then the mastering choices I had to make because of the vocals...

It's a lot of work... but I is tempted

I am getting ideas for writing though, so maybe that's where I'll put my energy instead...
... and there are, er, several more (um, double-figures, actually) of these songs from this early 90s period that would hold their own against these two... some would be harder to record, some easier... especially with what I've learnt in the last week.

[SE]

Quality all the way from start to finish, great song with production of the highest order.