"Angels Dressed in Black"

Soundtracking Your Life Part Eight--The Last Stand*: There's a specific moment in a lot of movies, when the female lead enters and one of two things happens. In the first she's shot from behind, then turns to reveal she's The Most Beautiful Woman He's Ever Seen (TM). This is generally accompanied with strings, or perhaps a harp, and may or may not be in soft focus. The other way of doing this usually shows up in Badass Movies That Don't Play By Your Lame Rules, Old Man (TM), so of course it's the more common of the two. The girl walks into the room as the camera pans up from her feet to reveal She's A Sex Bob-Omb (TM). The music in these scenes is usually "Bad to the Bone" or "Born to Be Wild" or one of its cooler offspring (Wolfmother's "Woman" is a good choice), and may or not involve a wind machine.

My idea was to marry the two, hence the title. It sort of moved away from that to a more generic "entrance theme", but that was my starting point. This was actually (albeit accidentally) a pretty good idea, as it gave me a good way to do an instrumental verse-chorus-verse structure. My initial plan was to have each "verse" end with a guitar solo, then go into the chorus, but the rock guitar solo is sort of my Kryptonite, because my normal playing/writing style is so different from it, so there's only one solo now, and as a result the "verses" (especially the second) ended up a lot shorter. I decided instead to end them with the noise blast you hear at the beginning, which is a tone cluster on a guitar synth played 2 octaves below a guitar's natural range, then I set the volume to fade in, then back out out quickly (I changed this part when I was remixing stuff, so it's wrong here but right for the later version which no one but me has heard).

I always knew the song would have this riff, but learning how to play it took a long time. It's actually two guitars, one playing the chords and one playing the response. I used a borrowed wah pedal (thanks, Tito!), and the overall sound is played by working the pedal while scratching the pick one the strings. I actually got the riff wrong-- I worked so hard trying to get the sound right I forgot there should be two dead notes at the end of each bar. This is basically the definition of missing the forest for the trees.

The synthesized vocals were played once (actually, I think it took about four takes), and then I used lots of copying and pasting to get them to sound at every vocal range, for a choral effect. I wrote them on piano and then had to basically custom-make a synthesizer that sounded just right. I originally wanted to use an organ, and add a bunch of harp and string sounds on top of it, but the fake choir just sounded more "clear," I guess.

*It's not the last StL song, just the last that you'll see on the blog. At some point in a million years or so I want to do a proper album of it, possibly with real musicians who can actually play guitar.

DOWNLOADABLE VERSION:

Rerelease Notes: I wasn't able to fix the riff, but I did fix some mixing problems, mainly changing the way the noise blasts are used and making the bass louder.