Sultry Dub

(Travellin' In This Country)

This was one of the last songs to be treated with guitar and vocals. Originally I had come up with a long (24-bar) horn phrase which rose and fell through several chord changes. Then I applied bass and chords to follow those changes. As a result, the song has a very long phrase form. ADX listened through a couple of times, then recorded 4 vocal takes at one session.

After dubbing up a rough mix, ADX had a couple more ideas, and returned the next week for another vocal session. This time, we laid down 7 new vocal tracks, and a doubled backing track, too. After a marathon editing session, the final vocal take was laid in over the backing track.

If you look at the horn section, you will see the 24-bar phrase played by sax, trumpet and trombone. This motif is repeated 3 times through the tune, without the horns the second time, and joined by the sax and trombone for the third time through.

By this point, I've got the procedure for organizing and importing vocal chunks into the NN-XT sampler pretty well fine-tuned. Each chunk is carefully named with the start and end bar number (see list on left of graphic, above), and each sample is cued to trigger on every chromatic step. Below, you can see the midi sequencer in action as the notes stairstep up through the vocal samples.

©2004 Dub Train Records