Silk Screens is a behind the scenes look at the making of a track.
In this edition, Brooklyn band Cloud Becomes Your Hand break down every detail that went into the recording of their track “Rat Jumps”
“Rat Jumps” started as an instrumental song idea by Weston Minissali (synthesizer). It was brought in just as sheet music, open for everyone to figure out the sounds. We worked on it a little but it didn’t get hashed out right away. I did a sequenced demo of it as a rock song with drums but thought it was boring. Everything started to make sense once I recorded the nylon string guitar and got rid of most of the programmed synths and drums. The guitar and a lot of the miscellaneous debris sounds were recorded at my friend Mercer’s cool warehouse called the Secret Squirrel in Athens, GA. All recordings were made through original MBox into Pro Tools.
The first audio sample here is of the guitar joined with Mandolin mostly playing drone notes. The pair go throughout the whole song while most of the other sounds come in and out. The mic was one of those MXR large diaphragms.
The electric guitar comes in to double certain lines. It is an ESP Eclipse in single coil mode going through a Memory Boy analog delay with the delay time turned to negligible and the modulation set on vibrato. The amp is a tiny Ibanez practice amp at my dad’s house.
Violin (played by Hunter Jack) starts off the song and is sprinkled around. Most of the time there are three or four tracks of violin unison making it sound chorus-y, and there’s some small room reverb on them.
The shaker is really the only steady percussion sound in this song. There’s an envelope filter with a low pass roving slowly on a pair of shaker tracks.
The marimba (played by Sam Sowyrda) was completely unprocessed—there’s not even any EQ on the track! But it’s doubled with the original programmed marimba run through the “AIR Vintage filter” (on Pro Tools) which chops off the attack and makes it mystical. It was recorded with a Studio Project C4 mic.
The other programmed sound that I left was this synth sound that I made in Reason.
When I was at the Secret Squirrel, Mercer set up a little studio room for me (what a pal!), and one day while I was tinkering around, he burst in the door and dumped a pile of harmonicas on the floor. I wound up using the chromatic one all over the recording.
One of the “fx” sounds is an instrument built by Mercer’s friend Greg. It is the most elaborate circuit bent keyboard I have ever seen. It’s a Yamaha Portasound with dozens of extra switches built in and even organ type drawbars coming out of it! I recorded myself jamming on it for a long time and have used the material in a few different ways.
Greg lent me another keyboard—I think the model was called “Polaris”? I used a patch that he made himself, probably used in his amazing band with Mercer: Bubbly Mommy Gun.
Next is a small Casio run through a bunch of guitar pedals, including Electro Harmonix micro synth.
Also there’s this riff at the end which is the Casio through a Line 6 guitar synth pedal… Most of the sounds on the Line 6 are over the top but there’s one or two sounds I just love.
And vocals… There are between one and three vocal tracks at any given time. One of them is mostly “clean,” one is more distorted with highs cut off, and one has very wet reverb. One of them gets pitch shifted an octave up for a sec. Anyway, here’s my favorite one: vocals through wah-wah.
There’s also some tambourine and backwards snare and a couple other things, but that’s it!
The words were written by myself and Isabel Martin. They are about the rats in the courtyard outside my apartment and how they have carnivals and stand in pyramids and jump through hoops of fire.
Rocks or Cakes is out on February 25th via Northern Spy.