Bad Animal (2005)
Chilled, down-tempo strings and beating tablas open this track, building to a rich atmospheric attack of wild guitars, then down to a chilled-out instrumental section in the middle, before, once more, the Bad Animal attacks again.
The origins of this track come from two separate ideas from quite some time ago. I went through a phase of loading samples from old "module" music files and using those for my music, in Midget (the music software I also created.)
Bad Animal's main melody came from a track I started, which sounded like funky horror music (in that it had some bass and drums as backing.)
The later part of the guitar solo originated as some live performance using string samples.
Acoustic Version
Toward the end of 2004, I came up with an acoustic guitar piece, which had a bit of a wild feel to it. It was constructed of a rhythm with lots of different percussion sounds, low strings, and the repeating muted guitar sound used in the final Bad Animal track.
After I lost all the tracks I had been working on for the album, this was the first one I re-made. The above extracts were recorded prior to losing the tracks (in case you didn't guess already!)
The Making of Bad Animal
I was experimenting with combinations of different sounds at the time, and found that joining 2 choir samples with 2 string samples resulted in a nice effect. This is what you hear at the start of Bad Animal, and throughout the backing. Hardly any changes were made to this sound since then. It's incredibly versatile, as it can function as both a pad/backing, and also a bass.
It's always nice to look back at how a track developed, to compare it and hear the difference. With Bad Animal, I kept hold of some of the "milestones", which you can hear here.
- First version (short guitar, different guitar)
- Guitar solo with a different guitar sound
- A bit more "polished"
They're not all that different, you might think, but there are some subtle changes along with more noticeable ones. In particular, I spent a long time tweaking the sound of that guitar used for the chorus, and trying to make the percussion work well.
Also, the older versions of the track had a shorter intro, and ended more abruptly.
You'll notice the muted guitar from the original version of this track is still used, even in the final thing.