Well the soundtrack is finally out, so now we can lift up the hood and take a look at all the nuts and bolts.

But I must start by saying that there is a serious issue with the packaging of the CD, and marketing materials online.

For some reason Sagar Desai, the official music director’s name was omitted from the CD jacket.

And as the film is currently being discussed online, his name doesn’t appear anywhere that I’ve seen, while Daniel B George who did the background score is getting all the credit.

Also one of the strengths of the CD are in the great lyrics written by Ankur Tiwari, who’s name is also missing.

While for DJ Chandu and I, who’s names do appear on the CD cover, the tracks we remixed are mislabeled.  And we are also missing the blanket credit of Producing, Mixing, and Mastering the OST.

That being said…

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Sagar was one of my first friends in India, a fellow Chicago-ean, and a fellow music director, so it was great to finally work on something together.

When he got the Quickgun Soundtrack through his association with Phat Phish, he asked us to help him produce two tracks.  Basically he wanted us to add some commercial polish and make the tracks more mainstream.

So our initial work on the project began only with the “Dialog Track” and “Mind It!”.

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Dialog Track
Brief:
Sagar had presented us this track with the brief that it had to be heavy on South Indian Rhythmic influences, and mixed with dialogs from the film.

Process:
Originally he brought the track to us at 157 BPM’s (beats per minute).

(One of my upcoming entries will discuss in more detail setting tempos, creating grooves, and managing energy, but the first thing I knew we had to do was to bring this tempo down.)

157BPM has a lot of energy, but renders the listener a bit overwhelmed if they are not dancing.

We went back and forth but settled on 145, which is at the top of a 4/4 techno space, so can be blended in a DJ set.

Also it forced us to only keep the elements that enhanced the groove, so we cleaned out a lot of stuff “weighing” the track down.

The main genetic has always been the heavy South Indian percussion loop layered throughout the track and the character dialogs, but I knew we needed to add a melodic element as a sort of tour guide to glue the whole track together.

So I wrote the main melodic lead that starts and continues throughout the track, which Sagar later had re-recorded with a Saraswaram.

Production:
Because of the density of the main percussion loop, and due to its staggered groove, it became difficult to both add elements that fit the groove, as well as create clarity for the dialogs, which weren’t of the highest original fidelity.

In the end the track became a balance between maintaining no more than 6 total elements at a time, a spatially wide mix, and drops to highlight certain dialogs.

Results:
For the last month of production Sagar had gone back to the US, and we were left to finish the music in conjunction with Fox.

Sagar seemed a little miffed upon his return that I had added the high dholak in various parts of the track.

My intention was to maintain the energy while keeping enough rhythmic shifts throughout the track.

He may be right in that the dholak sits on top of the staggered percussion loop and evens out the groove a bit, which does go against the brief.

But I don’t feel that a choice either way is detrimental to the track.

My main issue is that the song is a bit dialog heavy, as prescribed by Fox and Shashank (the director), and I know the track would play better at about 3:30 instead of 4:10 total time.

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Mind It
Brief:
Sagar had composed a very catchy track that to this day I think worked best in its original conception.

On his scratch vocal the only lyric was Mind it, and then a bunch of gibberish that Sagar does distinctively well (Wait till you hear Zambazi Func - his band with Blaaze from A. R. Rahman fame).

Basically the brief was to make a catchy front end song to help market the film.

Process:
This track ended up being a perfect example of why you have to map out your destination, or you will never get there.

This song has gone through countless permutations, and the end result is a mixed bag of ideas.

We’ve changed the tempo over and over, reworked the groove by adding and subtracting countless layers, and basically got stuck circling the middle.

There are actually two version of this song each with different music and lyrics, one sung by Mika Singh and another by Vijay.

For obvious marketing reasons Mika’s is the one that released.

The track was never quite right since we started making changes from the very beginning.

And then just before we reached the point where they were about to shoot the video, Mika had pointed out that the song was more of a “listening” track than a “dance” track, so we went back to the drawing board on the rhythm.

Me and DJ Chandu only had one night to work it out while Sagar was still in the US, and the results are what you hear on the CD.

Production:
One of the main issues we from the beginning was rhythmic fidelity.

The drum and percussion sections that Sagar had brought us had decent retro tones, but couldn’t fill up the top and bottom range of the spectrum.

There was a persistent lacking low-end to the kick, and the high end lacked brilliance.

The track just wasn’t translating well into a listener space, beyond the catchy lyrics.

Also the whole song ended up transposed 2 notes higher than where it was recorded, so you can hear the constrained artifacts of Melodyne (pitch-shifting software) on Mika’s vocals.

Results:
I kind of feel like everyone is equally slightly unhappy about this track which is probably the best we could hope for.

The song serves its purpose as a marketing vehicle, but doesn’t really maintain most of the elements that made Sagar’s original concept great.

In retrospect the track was never meant to be a dance track (that’s what the remix is for), and should have stayed lo-fi and lyrically oriented.

There are tradeoffs to an under-produced sound, but it fits the initial brief better than what’s been released.

This is a perfect example of how a producer needs a clear idea of what the song is supposed to be, where and when it will be played, and listened to by whom.

I feel like most of the time we were working from the approach of making changes to make the song better, without really knowing why we were fiddling with it in the first place.

And the end result sounds a bit overworked.

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In the next part I’ll discuss how we got into mixing and mastering the whole soundtrack, followed by how the remixes came about in the third part.

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1. Posts about music as of August 13, 2009 » BLOGVIDEOS 08.14.09 / 1am
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