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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: be additive

I worked for a few hours on SLEEPING IN BYRON'S BED today and yesterday. This song has an uptempo trance groove (135 bpm) with a long, slow vocal over the top. I recorded two verses and a chorus yesterday, listened back today and was pretty pleased with it so I decided to work on a bridge.

Many but not all pop songs have a bridge section. The standard pop song format is verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / chorus. You hear the verse and chorus a couple times, just enough to get familiar, then go away, take a little breather during the bridge, then come back to the verse again all freshened up. The bridge acts like an ear cleaner.

Folk songs don't have a bridge. Trance, ambient, and house - they don't have bridges either. What the latter have is something I call Area 51.

All U.F.O.-watchers know what the real Area 51 is (or what they think it is). Area 51 is a famously top-secret military base. Every conspiracy theorist knows that the United States government is hoarding scads of spaceship debris and little green corpses in a fenced off, well-guarded section of god-forsaken Nevada real estate known as Area 51. Stories are legion. UFO-watchers keep it under constant surveillance. Nothing important ever actually happens there.

Some songs have an Area 51. (Do you follow me? Am I making any sense at all?) Especially those songs that are based on highly repetitious groove and synth sequences like trance and house. Just what do you do for a bridge? You've already dropped out and added back in every instrument that works. Things are getting pretty boring about 3 minutes into this thing - so what do you do next? You've got to keep some part of the groove going. Maybe a Barry Manilow-style key change? Where are you? What strangeness lurks in this place? THIS is AREA 51.

So there I was this afternoon, staring right into the yawning maw of an Area 51. I was repeating an earlier section and I KNEW I COULDN'T DO THAT. It was too familiar, too... known. I needed to venture into the Unknown. I threw caution to the winds. I pulled up an interesting pad sound. I muted all the other pads (or at least I thought I did). I played a chord progression in a related key. Something BEAUTIFUL AND MOVING happened. I had accidentally left one of the old pads on and the chords blended into something strange and silver and green, flashing in the sun. It was a MOMENT! This is Area 51, I said. And I smiled.

Copyright 2002 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.