June 16, 2009 - Thoughts On A New Remaster Release

Many, many years ago (well ok, the summer of 2002), I wrote an album called New, which was before I called myself Partition 36. There were a couple of memorable songs on it, but it was the last track that recently caught my attention. It was called Boku no Kanojo ni Matteru, roughly translated as “Waiting for my girlfriend”, which is exactly what I was doing at the time when I wrote it. After listening to it a few times, I decided that I wanted to remaster it and present it in the sound quality that it deserves.

However, rather than doing a straight remaster of the original, I thought it might be cool to instead change out some of the instruments. The original song was written entirely using the General MIDI patch set on my JV-1010 synthesizer, and the more I listened to the slap bass/fingered bass combination, the less I liked it. So, I started a new project, opened up the old file in a second window, and started copying tracks over.

The first track I copied was the bass track. The sound of the slap bass in the original track was a bit too twingy sounding, while the fingered bass just sounded about right, so I wanted to get a good compromise between them. To do this I replaced them with a customized Prophet V patch that had a more rubbery/synthy pick sound on it but still provided solid bass frequencies. The downside was that this patch tends to phase in and out of being overpowering and just right in the sub-bass frequencies. Some quick processing and adjustment of the patch luckily fixed this.

The drum track was next, which at first proved to be a bit difficult to tackle. In the original, the kick drum was fairly solid in the lower frequencies, but was also very snappy. I wanted to find a sound that would instead provide a decent amount of punch, not as much snap, and would also play nicely with the bass track. As usual, I went through many of the preset drum kits in Battery 2 trying to find something that I could use as a starting point, but nothing really fit. Then I got the wild idea of reusing the drum kit from another song I wrote recently, Space Train. As luck would have it, the kit fit great inside the mix, giving it more of a synth rock feel that the song was supposed to have in the first place. The only thing was that this kit was made from scratch rather than basing it on a preset one, and Space Train never used an open high-hat sound. Once this was replaced, the main work for the drum track was pretty much complete and sounded great.

There’s a certain type of sound used quite a bit in electronic music called a “pad”. Just like the name says, it provides “padding” for the rest of the mix by filling it out harmonically. The original track used the Warm Pad sound off my JV-1010, which has always been a favorite of mine. However, it sounded just a bit too dense for this new mix. This was easily solved by finding a similar sound in my Jupiter-8V software.

Next was the Koto sound used for the bulk of the melody. At first I tried replacing this with custom Prophet V and Moog Modular V patchs, but this proved disastrous. Instead I stuck with the original track, re-recorded it, and just passed it through a better reverb. I then layered a soft pingy sound from my Pentagon software synth with it in certain places to give it something extra.

The melody is split between the Koto sound and another bell-like sound called “Fantasia JV”. This has been one of my favorite synth patches ever, and so I knew in an instant that I would not be replacing it. So I transferred it over and just re-recorded it.

By this time the only thing left to move over was the guitar track. I have never, ever had good luck in finding a decent guitar sound on a synthesizer. Maybe I’m just not sequencing the track right, but I’ve never been able to get something that sounds close to a real guitar. For this song, I first played with the idea of changing it to a piano or electric piano solo, but it didn’t sound right. So I copied the old track over, switched patches on my JV-1010 to the “Big Hair Lead” sound, re-recorded it, and then passed it through a ton of plugins. In the end it sounds better than the original, but is still not very pretty. But I wanted the solo in there and it’s good enough for me.

In the end, I think the remaster/reworking turned out pretty good. The guitar solo is still the low-point of it and I admit it sounds like crap, but I like the new sound a lot better. I decided to change the track name slightly to Ore no Kanojo ni Matteru, which still means the same thing but has a slightly different nuance.

You can download the new version here, and you can also listen to the original version here. Enjoy :^)