In terms of production, I focused more on the vocals and vocal arrangement on Emotional Labour than I have in the past. I achieved this by being quicker to lock in changes and mix decisions on the instruments. I’ve found with my songs that the drums and vocals end up being by far the loudest elements, so I’ve decided more and more not to worry about small differences in sound for melodic instruments.
Instrument-wise, the drums are from the 808 patch on the Session Drummer 3 VST in Cakewalk. The bass is made out of a sampled and pitched “long” 808 kick from the same kit. So I made the basslines in the DAW by hand, moving waveforms around and using pitch-shifting plugins to make them the notes I wanted. Functionally, the bass and drums are looped throughout, with some small deviations. Occasionally I’d have a “busy” and “less busy” bassline and switch between them in verse and chorus. Other times I’d also have the drums add a second shorter kick sound. But overall, the drum and bass loops are very static. Any auxiliary percussion is recorded from gear I own, or downloaded from Freesound.org .wav files.
The rest of the instruments were the standard ones I’ve used on several previous albums: the Yamaha trombone and Fender strat electric guitar, both primarily running through Guitar Rig for effects, and my great-grandmother’s early 20th century (Sears catalog) violin. I actually finally gave up on this violin shortly after finishing the instrumental recording for the album in 2019. It had been broken 5 years earlier at a festival in Atlin, BC - the neck, previously repaired, had snapped along with the binding holding the top part of the body together - and the scond repair job that I’d had done was failing. So I bought a new (even older) violin, which I’ve played since and which I’ll use on my next album. It’s a violin made in Scotland in 1886 by Frank DeVoney, who was originally a tailor, was an early proponent of plate tuning systems in violin making, and also made his own prosthetic limb. Anyway, I think it sounds nice. I also added some keyboard sounds like synth and organ bass to a few of the songs, and after the vocals were recorded I overdubbed some theremin parts using my Moog Theremini.
The main challenge on vocals was how and when to use autotune, since this was something I’d identified I wanted to try. I used the Waves Tune Real-Time plugin, and think I found a way to use the effect that wasn’t too heavy-handed, but that fit the genre. I defaulted to double- or triple-tracking most of the main vocals, and wound up turning those doubles down as I went on mixing (in the verses especially). I definitely didn’t use as many “answering” vocals as artists like Future do (he has them follow pretty much every line), but I did it a bit. I also pitched my vocals a bit on certain songs, adding a low octave or just pitching them down a semitone or two to mess with the timbre of them. For “Uncross Your Arms,” I did this with the auto-tuned vocals, singing them a third up, and then pitching them down into key. Overall, I didn’t have a ton of harmonized vocals on these songs, the exception being “Friendzone.” I didn’t really obsess over vocal processing either. I focused on listening at low volume when comping and fixing timing issues, then slapping presets on to see which helped them cut through the mix in a good way, then making sure they didn’t sound too harsh.
I printed the individual instruments to stems once I got a working mix so I could remove the temptation to continue to tinker with things. For vocals, this meant that I reduced the parts to stereo channels for leads, doubles, and harmonies. I mostly didn’t regret cutting myself off from further changes, although I eventually wished I’d separated the snare from the hats and percussion. There were a few vocal parts where I had timing issues that were difficult to resolve to my liking. “Smiles are Free” was one, in the verses. I slowly chipped away at them while finalizing the rest of the mix.
Similar to my violin, this project saw the last use of my trusty M-Audio FastTrack 8R interface, whose drivers were years and years out of date and which had developed multiple noisy channels. I’ve used that interface on just about all the recordings I’ve done, but since I don’t record live drums anymore (and having seen how well Laura Smith worked with an Apogee Duet) I decided I only need a couple channels that I can trust to sound good. So I got an Apollo Twin USB, which came in time to be used for mastering this album.
As previously, I mixed on my Adam F5 monitors and my Sony MDR-7509HD headphones, which I thought were breaking but turned out just needed their screws tightened. Pretty good for 10+ year old headphones. When testing the mixes and making revisions, I also listened on cheap earbuds and in the car, my only real opportunity to judge the bass. In terms of loudness, I did go fairly loud on these songs since that’s what the comparable tracks I listened to seemed to do. But, looking at the waveforms, they’re not completely smashed. Overall, sound-wise, I worry that the mids are too busy with instrumentation to give proper space and prominence to the vocals. And I hope that the bass levels aren’t too all over the place, given that I didn’t test it with a proper subwoofer and the Sony headphones don’t have a ton of bass. My goal is for it to sound okay enough for people to listen to the songs for the content, so I think I achieved that.
I decided I wanted to do low-effort videos for all of the songs on Emotional Labour, since my ambitions to film and cut together my own footage for the songs on Extinct! fizzled and I didn’t end up doing them all. So I copied my video format from the MB-LP album, tinting archival footage with specific colours and overlaying them with videos of my mouth singing the songs. This time I made three mouths, one large one at the bottom and two smaller ones on top, to form a disturbing “mouth-face.” All of the footage I used is from Archive.org, most from the Prelinger Archive, and all in the public domain.
One video got me in trouble with YouTube: the “High T” video is footage from a shrill 1960s anti-pornography film called “Perversion for Profit.” The problem, as YouTube content bots/moderators noticed, is that the film contains a lot of (censored) pornography, meant to shock the viewer. I appealed the content ban, saying that “the song decries the cultural propagation of sexism and toxic masculinity. Including the video satirically comments on the view that pornography is to blame, instead of puritanical morality crusaders like the film’s presenter.” A funny argument to make to a censor, but the challenge was withdrawn.
I really didn’t think too much about the video content, I was just looking for something that was somewhat visually interesting that “felt right” to juxtapose with the song, out of the limited number of videos I watched and downloaded. Although it took a very long time to finish and release, I’m happy with the album as it turned out and feel ready to work on my next collection of songs while I put these ones out. It’s been a long time since I performed, and COVID has made it so that I’m not really excited to start anytime soon, but I hope it will be validating to have others hear and react to Emotional Labour’s challenging, answerless, morally fraught songs.
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