Motus Mentis

A follow-up to yesterday’s item marking the death of Brian Wilson:

Readers may know that I’m a member of a musical collective called the Shoal Survivors, a group of friends who get together a few times a year to make recordings, do performances, and just generally hang out and have fun. Last year as part of our autumnal gathering we decided to play a set of music from the Sixties, and one of the songs we had our eye on was the Beach Boys classic “Good Vibrations”, one of the late Brian Wilson’s masterpieces.

Our fearless leader, my boyhood pal Carl Sturken, asked me to figure out the song’s vocal arrangement, so we could decide how to assign the various parts (there are a lot of them!) to our various singers. To help me with this, he found (somewhere online) a MIDI file with a rough outline of the song’s instrumental structure, and sent it to me.

For those of you who don’t know, a MIDI file is kind of like a digital player-piano roll; it specifies note values and durations in a way that computerized instruments can read. So I took the file, loaded it up in Pro Tools, assigned the parts (rather hastily) to various synths and e-drums, and slapped together a guide track.

My plan had been to analyze the song, and to use a keyboard to play separate tracks for each vocal part, which I could then isolate and give a copy of to each of the people who would be singing. But I’m not a great keyboard player, and I soon realized that it would be easier just to sing the guide tracks myself (which would also be better for coaching the singers because it would include all the lyrics and phrasing).

I can’t remember how long it took me — a day or two, I guess — but I finally did manage to get all the parts figured out, and get them all down on “tape”. (It turned out to be over twenty tracks of vocals.) The finished product was just what we needed when we finally got together and started rehearsing. We performed the song last September at Ferry Beach, in Saco, Maine, and I have to say it came out pretty well.

We do so much recording that we always have a giant backlog of stuff to mix (the material we’ve managed to put up on our YouTube channel so far is just a fraction of what we have “in the can”), and I haven’t had a chance yet to mix the recording we made of the actual performance. (I’ll put it up when I get around to mixing it.) But when Brian Wilson died last week I remembered the vocal study I’d recorded for rehearsals, and thought that some of you might enjoy hearing it. So here it is (please keep in mind that this was just a hasty rough mix, and that the instrumental MIDI “bed track” is very, very crude, and was never meant as anything more than a rudimentary placeholder). All vocals are by your humble correspondent.