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Buzzalicious

from The Singles - Season 3 by Kicksville

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About Buzzalicious
Y'know, we didn't really plan this ahead of time, but it's kinda perfect that Buzzalicious is coming out during the World Cup in South Africa since it's sung in Zulu! First things first, though: Initially this song was entirely built around the bass line. At the time, I was deeply into a South African bass-line fetish, and I had also just gotten a new Pedulla Buzz bass - hence the title. And I'll bet you thought Buzzalicious was named after something else! ;-)

After we filled out the musical arrangement, Buzzalicious really took its final shape thanks to Nafeesa Nichols (poet and African studies scholar) and Sihle Ngema (principal cast member of the national tour of The Lion King). During a visit to the studio, Nafeesa improvised an awesome spoken word/sing-song thing in Zulu over the raw tracks, but the song still needed a strong vocal melody as a counterpoint.... So, it sat in the archives for a while until Sihle came to town last May with The Lion King, and City Council member Beaker (who conveniently happened to be working the gig) asked Sihle if he'd come out to the studio. Sihle's jaw hit the floor when he heard Nafeesa's tracks - it must have been a hell of a surprise to come into a random studio in the American Midwest and hear Zulu spoken word! Sihle jumped in with both feet and imrpovised the melody and lyrics around Nafeesa's parts, putting the final piece of the puzzle in place.

Nafeesa was kind enough to translate her and Sihle's parts for us, which are more of a stream-of-consciousness thing than lyrics. Very loosely, the song is calling out to a young man, saying he needs to come home and watch out for his children and family. So in the end, somehow my fetish for South African bass lines met up with two different vocalists fluent in Zulu, leaving us with a song released during a World Cup hosted by South Africa. Sewuphelele mazwi!

The Music
Advanced Recording Techniques: Cheating Acoustics 101
Here's an old trick that still works really well when needed: The drum kit on this song was originally tracked in a pretty small room with low ceilings and lots of carpet, which doesn't make for a particularly BIG drum sound.... Now that have a much better space to record drums, when I started mixing Buzzalicious, I really missed the ambience we now get from high ceilings and space to use lots of room mics. So, I took a pair of reference monitors up the drum room, spread 'em out as wide as I could, and placed a pair of AKG 414s (set on omni) a few feet back from the speakers. Then, I proceeded to pump the original drum tracks at full-on live drummer volume through the monitors, and recorded the sound picked up by the room mics back into the project. It's not quite the same as working with an actual live drum kit, but it works well enough to get some ambience into the tracks instead of trying to create it artificially by using reverb and/or delay effects!

credits

from The Singles - Season 3, track released June 28, 2010
cover art: Buzzalicious by Skinny Gaviar
Conrad St. Clair: bass, keys, percussion, programming
Mike Stehr: keys, percussion
Lou Caldarola: drum kit, percussion
Chris Huntington: guitar
Sihle Ngema: vocals
Nafeesa Nichols: spoken word
Beaker Parpovich: percussion

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Kicksville Madison, Wisconsin

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