Moon Palace » if you don’t know why

If You Don’t Know Why 03

Anders — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:55:14 +0000

Måns and I talked on MSN on how to make the song less monotonous so I fiddled around with shortening the intro and only letting Måns sing every second phrase in the verse. I only had time to edit the first verse, so the second is still the same as in 02. I also did some editing of the bass track.

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If You Don’t Know Why 02

Måns — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:51:23 +0000

Last night I re-recorded the vocals for If You Don’t Know Why, after changing a couple of lines in the lyrics. Also I tried a couple of different approaches in singing styles, and today Anders made a remix of the song, with a couple of new sounds, like an acoustic guitar.

In my opinion, this song is starting to become something more, and I will now go ahead and change the status from “sketch” to “song” here on moonpalace.se. I’m still not entirely pleased with the song structure, and I want to shake things up a bit to make it more interesting, especially in the second verse. I’m thinking of adding some vocal harmonies. We’ll see.

On the bright side, I think this is the best vocal sound we’ve had yet. And I don’t mean the cool tape reverb slap-back effect, but just overall “sound” of the voice on this track is better than what we’ve heard so far. I think. What do you think?

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If You Don’t Know Why 01

Måns — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:03:58 +0000

Last night I added a first vocal draft to the song previously known as “Airwaves“. After finishing the first lyrics I changed the name of the song to “If You Don’t Know Why”, but I’m not sure this name will stick around.

This is a very rough recording, more of a vocal sketch really. This is something I like to do to give Anders the idea of how I envision the vocal sound and feel for the song, and then he usually thinks for a while, works his magic, and it comes back sounding really great. :)

There are a LOT of words in this song. Perhaps too many. I want to figure out a way to make the verse more interesting, either by adding another vocal track, or coming up with variations on the song melody. Anders suggested taking out every other line of the text and replacing it with an instrument “response”. I’m not sure, but I think something needs to happen to keep it from being boring.

I was trying to hold a specific image in my head as I wrote the lyrics, as is my current way of writing, but I kind of ran aground when I had no more ways to describe the scene, so the lyrics will most definately change over time, whether or not we take out lines.

Also, this mix is very strange. I did something weird with the compressor and as a result it all sounds… strange. But it’s a work in progress, and everything must be put on the blog – as bad as it might be! :)

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If You Don’t Know Why

Måns — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:52:03 +0000

This song started life as a sketch by Anders called “Airwaves“. It’s a somewhat different sound for Moon Palace, but that’s what this whole thing is all about – finding out what happens when we make the music we want to make.

An interesting thing about this song is that Anders had made the sketch and envisioned the vocals as slow, floating on top of the busy background. Since I had no idea, I went with what I felt like after listening to the sketch, which is the faster, rockier sound we’ve ended up with. I’d still like to know how the original idea for the vocals would have sounded.