A Digigram VX Pocket card was also installed in the laptop which allowed S/PDIF interfacing between the ISA and the laptop. We figured it would be fun to release this catchy pop song which is actually fundamentally about vacuous catchy pop songs!”įor the custom vocal parts Toby used a mobile setup comprising two mics, a laptop and a Focusrite ISA220 interface. We ended up discussing the current state of the pop industry and the involvement of fashion through the lyrics. “The other song we did in Seattle, ‘Tongue In Chic’, had backing which I had sent over to Jennifer before, and that was actually the track we had planned to work on while I was over there. I still left the vocal quite raw because, although we live in the age of Autotune, I wanted the sound of someone being absolutely real and expressing their deep feelings. “I considered just leaving it there but it was literally just a piano, pad and singer so, although those elements still form the basis, I developed the track further back at home. When I met Jennifer the next day I asked her if she wanted to improvise over the top. I looped both the piano and pad part and then all I was doing was opening up the filters in NI’s Absynth to get a bit of movement into the backing. I fired up Logic and put together a four chord pattern using an EXS24 piano, and then added a held chord of a pad sound in synth. I was in Seattle to play a gig and I’d already met up with Jennifer to record her vocals for the track ‘Tongue In Chic’, but as I sat in the hotel room before my gig I though it would be nice to get her to sing something else while I was nearby.
“The first vocal song, ‘Grey Over Grey’, was improvised, and done in one take, apart from a slight glitch at the start which I had to clean out. “Basically I let them get on with it,” says Toby. On both ‘Gray Over Gray’ and ‘Tongue In Chic’ the vocals were performed by Jennifer Folker, whilst Julie Daske added her voice to the other tracks. “I really wanted to use a particular sound from the Nord,” Toby explains, “and I used the Korg MS2000 arpeggio purely because I could quickly and easily set up the arpeggiator and, at that point, I hadn’t used the arpeggiator in Logic and didn’t want to stop working on the song to do some learning that day!”Īpart from some sample-based vocal parts used in the album’s opening track, ‘Down From the Mountain’ live vocals do still play an important role on some of the other tracks. “I didn’t set out to use just soft synths and a computer, but once I started working on the first tune, I found that every time I wanted to do something I was thinking ‘I bet Absynth will be good for that, or FM7 can do this.’ A few years ago I wouldn’t have wanted the sound of a software studio, but one of the reasons this album has been recorded in the way it has is because that technology has got so good.”īy the time You Are Here was complete, the only sounds that originated from Toby’s impressive collection of audio hardware were an arpeggio generated by a Korg MS2000 synthesizer and a tone produced by a Clavia Nord Lead synth. “About 99 percent of this album was done in the computer, but I doubt if there was a single soft synth on any of the albums before this one,” explains Toby Marks, referring to his 2004 Banco De Gaia album, You Are Here.
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