"What You See Is What You Get" by Magnetic Heads - Behind the scenes
In about a month’s time, an album that I am incredibly proud of will be released. It’s called Moral Outage by my great musical pal Jonathan “Jono” Miller, AKA Magnetic Heads. When the album drops, I’ll go into further detail about it’s creation, though in the meantime I thought it would be nice to take a quick look at this third single that dropped this week.
Like all tracks on the album except for a few moments, this is entirely Jono and I.
This is one of the earliest songs I heard near the beginning of the project - Jono had made a seriously rough, though thoroughly haunting demo that had a lot of the important things you hear in the final version - the piano riff and the deadpan robotic chorus mantra. I was like, what the hell is this?!? It’s all retro futuristic and entirely dystopian - I felt like I was one of the poor workers waiting in line to get on the train in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I got all kinds of imagery in my head when I initially heard it which is a good sign for creativity, so I requested that we’d work on this as soon as possible, and yes it was one of the first tracks we cut for the album.
We started in traditional fashion; programmed the drums, and deciding whether to go synth or electric bass in which the latter was chosen. I jumped on my Fender Precision and pumped out a part with what we’d call The Queen Is Dead vibes. Next was nailing the piano sound and we fiddled with all kinds of cheap and nasty software piano’s - we wanted it to sound super fake. With some serious processing done, we landed on a piano sound we liked so much that it became a hallmark of the album, showing up all over the place.
As we built the track up taking turns jumping on the synthesizer, we knew simplicity was key. We wanted synths like cloud bursts, and a nice driving motorik rhythm section - a quick acoustic guitar track was laid, as well as some fuzzy electric in the chorus’s that I did my best to make sound reminiscent of the guitars on New Order’s Technique album.
Jono very quickly nailed his vocals as per usual. The track sounded hot, it was nearly there… It was late at night, and since Jono was crashing over at the studio, we’d had a few beers. Just before calling it for the night, I had a midnight brain twig - I really wanted to pull the track out of Fritz Lang’s dark, dirty subway, and into this;
I was sure that the way to achieve the sonic equivalent of this image was to create a sustained choir of Jono’s voice, in the same kind of way that 10cc had on their timeless classic, I’m Not In Love. Whereas they had laboriously recorded their aah’s over the course of months and created chromatic vocal tape loops that they would then “play” using an audio mixer, I only wanted about 7 crucial notes to work with. I tried my best to describe my scheme to Jono, quickly rattling off the whole 10cc technique and he just kinda raised an eyebrow at me. I was like, “It will make sense in the morning”.
The next day I did just that; recorded Jono singing the 7 notes I wanted whereby I created loops in the computer that I could play using an analog mixer. I ended up just playing along to the whole track, pushing up notes here and there as I wanted creating heavenly vocal washes. I nailed my third attempt and that’s what you hear on the track. It added that cool blue sky / winter morning air that I felt the arrangement needed. Thank you 10cc.
Last thing to go down was Jono’s magnificent electric guitar melody in the outro… I’m struggling to remember what guitar was used, but listening to it now I think it’s most likely my Telecaster through a Fender ‘65 Princeton. Once he nailed that, the track was ready to mix. I ended up mixing the track three times over the course of the year, as I’d get a new piece of gear now and then and I’d be like “I wanna use this on What You See Is What You Get !!!”. The main addition to the studio was a new console of which I was so impressed with the sound that I remixed any tune off the album I had already mixed, using the new console.
The last key to the puzzle was good mastering and this came courtesy of Jason Mitchell from LOUD Mastering in the UK who did a brilliant job.
Thanks you if you made it this far… really this is just good for me to get down so I don’t forget it. The making of this album was such a creative experience, as I had licence to try out whatever kooky ideas came to me. It was truly collaborative, so it almost had the feeling of working on a solo album - but without the pressure of having to write the songs, hehe.
