Silk Screens: Yuno – “Sunlight”

Sep 12, 2012 by PORTALS

For our twelfth and latest installment of Silk Screens we’ve asked Florida fizzy pop wizard Yuno (formerly unouomedude) to spill his guts on his latest single “Sunlight”. Having recently met a Kickstarter goal that will enable him to record more satisfactorily as well as play his songs live, Yuno promises that this track is only the tip of iceberg of what we’ll be hearing from him in the future.

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When I wrote “Sunlight”, I had already spent a long time trying to work on songs for my new record, but I kept running into the problem of not being able to get the sounds I wanted. My recording setup is mainly my guitar, my bass, and my computer. All of my effects come from VSTs and my computer can’t properly handle a lot of the stuff I want to do. I was getting frustrated trying to make songs with a lot of layers, so I purposely tried to make a simple song.

A lot of my songs are inspired by photographs. When I see an image I like, I usually think of music right away. I like to keep track of photos to use later for music reference. I was going through my flickr feed and I found this photo by Julia Alejandra Feldman. That’s when I came up with the beginning guitar riff. I had this really dreamy feeling, so I fleshed it out with some delay, pitch effects and a bunch of reverb. It just kind of felt nice to keep that throughout the whole song.

The bass and drums just came naturally. I wanted them to be simple too, but my I usually put a bit more detail in the bass parts. I don’t play drums, or have a complete drumset. I have a snare and a hand drum. All of my drum sounds are layered samples I’ve collected over the last few years. There are usually between three and five sources for each drum sound I use. I have a primary set of drum sounds that I use mapped to my MPD32. Lately, I just tweak the drum sounds a bit for each song.

The vocals in this song are purposely really airy for me. I don’t know very many vocal terms, but I have to breathe out of mouth heavily while I sing this song. There are probably 5-7 layers of vocals. It just kept needing more. I also used two different reverbs. I maxed out the reverb on everything in this song. I just wanted to capture the really dreamy feeling I had. I didn’t use a lot of different sounds like I normally like to, but I feel like something good came out of me trying to make something overly simple.

I wrote the song mainly about a friend of mine that I want to hang out with. We always talked about our problems and looked forward to hanging out in the future. We don’t talk as much now, but when we do, it’s still the same relationship as it was then. I’ve realized that I just generally want to see a lot of people and a lot of places. So, “Sunlight” for me is basically just about how I’ll feel better once I get to do the things I want to do, see the people I want to see, and go to the places I want to go.

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Yunoweluvudude.

(curated by Cactus-Mouth)