Case Study: "Do I Wanna Know" Arctic Monkeys
Hey everybody, as you might of seen, my previous post was an investigation into the aesthetics of one of my favourite songs Back Against The Wall by Cage the Elephant and the technical and creative processes that helped the production team end up with the final product. Today we're going to do the same thing but with a different song, a different band and a slightly different genre - the main purpose of this case study is to identify some key aesthetics and techniques that are used in a similar, relevant but different genre. So this case study is on the Arctic Monkeys' song Do I Wanna Know - a well know favourite born of an Indie rock and Post-Punk Revival fusion.
Have a listen to the song below!
So let's start with a bit of background information on the band. Arctic Monkeys are from Sheffield England and formed in 2002. They have released 5 studio albums and consist of members Alex Turner (Vocals), Matt Heiders (Drums), Jamie Cook (Guitar) and Nick O'Malley (Bass). Arctic Monkeys are an extremely well know band with a very large fanbase and over 20 million views on almost every song they upload to youtube. These guys are a class act and it is perfectly demonstrated through the uniqueness and ingenuity of their music.
So now let's take a look a the physical structure of the song. The song travels at a bpm of 85 throughout and uses a 4/4 time signature. The song was written in the key of A#/Bb Major and has a very interesting and catchy lick that is heard throughout most of the song (but we'll get to this later). Below I've mapped out the arrangement of the song for us to analyse.
This song structure is considerably different to the last song we looked at. In Back Against the Wall the verses were short helping the song cycle through the chorus three times rather than twice. As you can see the arrangement of the song is intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus verse, pre-chorus, chorus outro.
Now, me being a guitarist, you and I both know that I just can't help investigating that lick just a little bit before we move on to the technical aspects of the investigation. I think this lick is awesome because it's really simple and uses the concept of pauses in an extremely successful way. This is interesting to me because when I compare this to some other similar songs like Catfish and the Bottlemen's Soundcheck I can really see the emotions and vibes it can impose on the song. I mean, both bands are using drums, bass, lead guitar, rhythm guitar and vocals. Both songs are about a girl and feelings of sadness, regret and looking for answers, and both bands rely heavily of backup vocals for powerful choruses - but yet in my opinion the Arctic Monkeys sound much more sincere and honest and their song seems more powerful. Now don't get me wrong, this also the result of hundreds of other choices, but for me a contributing factor is definitely how transparent that main lick is. Let me map it out for you quickly (Please excuse the mistake with the third last note).
Okay so now let's go bit further into this song and start to discuss what instruments are present, what techniques have been used to make them sound the way they do, and what technical and creative processes can be heard throughout the production.
Let's start with the kick. My first thought about the kick in this track is that the kick is definitely a sample, or layer of samples - it's extremely consistent in tone, velocity and timing and doesn't have those typical "human" characteristics that can be heard in the performance of a real drummer. As you can probably hear the sample has been quite heavily processed, hence the gritty, dirty sound. This sounds like is could have been achieved with distortion and saturation but done in a parallel fashion - I can still hear the unprocessed version of the sample underneath providing that foundation and support for the effected version to jump out at you. The kick is placed in the centre of the stereo field as can be expected to drive the song and create a solid foundation for the rest of the track to built upon. Finally, in regards to it's frequency makeup, the bass of the song occupies the 40-60hz range, some upper lows are sitting at around 100-200hz which I think are some of the distorted elements, plus the transient of the kick up around the 1kHz area. These frequencies can be seen in the image below.
Next let's talk about the snare, or rather, where a snare would normally go. In this case, taking the place of a snare is a snare / clap sample combination - I say samples because there is no doubt here that the consistency in the sound you are hearing is too high for a real instrument like a snare drum where there are so many variables (how hard you hit, where you hit etc). But what's interesting isn't only the blend of a snare and a clap (because to be honest this is quite common) it's the inclusion of one of the same layers that we heard in the kick drum. Is it the kick drum using a sample layer form the snare or is it a snare layer being used in the kick? I don't know! It's all so confusing, ahh the anarchy. But seriously, this is actually very common as well in pop music - often blending the layers from the kick in with the snare drum to make it punchier and create less of a dynamic between the two so it feels more continuous and driving. But before I rave on about my advanced detective skills too much, let's see if we can identify the same band of frequencies in the snare as we can in the kick.
There they are, almost identical. If you compare the picture directly above to the image shown whilst we were discussing the kick drum, you can see that our ears do not deceive us - we are dealing with one or more sample layers being present in both sounds. Other than these interesting spectral discoveries it's also worth noting that the snare is actually not panned and consequently kept dead centre. What this, plus all of the other discoveries we've made, are telling us is that even though this is a rock song by a rock band the track has been approached with a very commercialised mindset - I'm not saying that the song is pop, but let's just say it's able to be enjoyed by those who like pop.
Let's move on, the next part of the 'kit' I would like to talk about are the hats and cymbals. All four of them. I'm only joking, the choruses have very prominent use of the cymbals throughout them but the verses and pre choruses have only one hit - so it's harder to determine the characteristics of them because they're only just audible above all of the other instruments in the choruses. But hey, when has that stopped us before? With the hats and cymbals I'm hearing a few inconsistencies in the hits which means that they could be the real deal - genuine instruments. This supports the above hypothesis of the heavily processed kick and snare sample combination. This is because it's common for artists to record the all of the elements of a song on a real kit and then substitute in more desirable kick and snare samples if that commercial sound is what they are aiming for. Now let's look at how they sit in the mix and what frequencies they occupy. In regards to balance and the stereo field they sit just above the backing vocals and are panned to their respective position on a drum kit. Although the stereo image seems a bit narrow - this could possibly be a result of the miking technique or position. Frequency wise, I've compared a section of the song without the hats and cymbals and compared it to a section which does. Keep in mind that there is some other high frequency content in the second image from the backing vocals but it will still give us a rather accurate illustration.
Finally, the last element of the percussion that is used in this track is a tambourine. The tambourine can be heard throughout the pre-choruses and choruses. There are two factors which make me think that it is a real instrument. Firstly, it sounds very human - it sounds like it has an evolving groove which is difficult to replicate, and also in the live performance of the song they have a person entirely dedicated to playing the tambourine. That's him below. I mean, how did they get Dave Grohl to play tambourine for them! Just kidding of course.
Now, I understand that just because they play it live, doesn't mean on the studio version it's not a sample. However, during their live performances of the song the drummer uses a programmable drum pad to play the samples that we identified used in the kick and snare. Therefore, it stands to reason that if it WAS a sample, they would just use a similar trigger pad. I understand that this isn't really critical thinking, but I was stumped about what it could have been. The tambourine sounds very natural and has been mixed to sit under the high hats but above the rest of the kit. The lower highs that it provides helps create a very solid percussive foundation for the song and like touched on before, really fill in the frequency gaps in the kit.
I just wrote two paragraphs on a tambourine. Excuse me a second, I just have to go reconsider almost all of my life decisions.
The bass in this song is a key element because of how hard they've tried to drive the song with that alternating kick and snare combination. The bass makes it's appearance almost straight away in the second bar and is prominent throughout the entire song. Listening carefully to the mix the bass sounds a little distorted but still not harsh. To get this sound, I think an accurate technique would be to mic the amp for the distortion and take the DI to give it some strength. Additionally, based on how the transient of the sound isn't very noticeable I'd guess that the bassist was not using a pick for the recording of this song. To get the bass to sit well in the mix there would have been some unmasking performed with an EQ as well as some light compression to make the bass a little punchier.
The lead guitar in the song is really prominent and crisp - it jumps out of the song and sucks you in, its truly is the hook of the song. The lead is quite mid-rangy as can be expected with most electric guitars and has probably been low cut and slightly high cut to prevent frequency masking. I feel like there is a small amount of compression on the lead as well but only enough to make it sound slightly more punchy and consistent and clear.
Now to my favourite element of this song - the rhythm guitar. Throughout the verses, the rhythm guitar plays the same melody as the lead guitar except distorted / overdriven, with slightly less level and panned to the right. The double up of the rhythm and lead create a really surrounding an immersive melody that draws you in. The guitar sounds crisp and cut's through nicely - this makes me think that the engineer couldn't have used anything with 'warm' or 'mid-range' characteristics like an MD421 or a C414. Now it may seem like the easy way out but it's completely possible that this was simply an SM57.
The vocals in this song were intended to be the star of the show. They've been performed well, recorded well and had some interesting processing which really had a positive effect on the final product. I can hear two things going on. Firstly, I can hear some saturation, giving the vocal a slight abrasion in the lower frequencies that the vocal occupies. This gives the vocals an analogue feel which aesthetically ties in with the distorted rhythm guitar. Secondly, I'm hearing an extensive amount of delay on the vocal. The delay is very noticeable and helps widen the vocal and compensates for the harshness that the saturation creates.
Now, I'm not going t lie, the backing vocals are the worst element of this song in my opinion. I feel like they really overpower the main vocal and just seem extremely fuzzy and messy. I definitely feel like they could have been crisper and lower in level to create a more appropriate balance between the backing vocal and the main vocal and to lower the mid range pre scene of the song. These backing vocals are mainly performed by the bands drummer and have been layered to sound thick and full, but like we discussed, I feel like there the weakest part of the mix.
In regards to the stereo field of this song, the mix engineer was effective in creating an enjoyable and immersive mix. This is mostly because the song uses the very tried and tested method of kick, bass and vocals down the centre, hats panned accordingly, lead guitar to the left and rhythm to the right. What's interesting about this song is how the snare is positioned in the mix - because it's a sample and not meant to recreate a drum kit it's centred so it can help drive the song. Let's have a look at a few screenshots of Flux's Stereo Tool taken from different points in the song to look at the stereo spread and the strength of the spread.
As you can see the song has a pretty average degree of stereo spread. You can see the guitars creating the fuzziness on the edges and the kick and the vocal belting out of the centre. One thing to keep in mind is that Flux's Stereo Tool is a very reserved tool as opposed to other stereo plugins which react very abruptly and definitively - Flux's plugin gives you an insight into the bigger picture rather than every single spike of sound and where it is going.
We're almost done, we've only got a few more things to talk about and one of these things is dynamics. Dynamic range is a vital element of any interesting and well,... dynamic, song. Let's have a look at the waveform of the song so we can start to get an idea of the songs dynamic range.
To be completely honest the track is a little driven into the limiter. The song still has dynamic range as you can see in the difference between the verses, pre-choruses and choruses - but in the choruses you can see the squaring of the edges as the limiter brings the peaks down. Like we talked about in the last case study I did, there's an awesome program called DRC Meter. DRC Meter is great because it uses magic and unicorns to calculate how much compression was applied to the whole track over its lifetime. Let's run the Arctic Monkeys song through DRC and see what it reveals!
As you can see, DRC Meter gave us a result of +4.4. If you consult the key that Pitchtech gives you, this suggests that the song has had strong compression applied to it. These results concur with my original statement of considerable compression whilst maintaining SOME dynamic range. However, what's interesting is that I've ran countless rock songs through this tool and I've never had a 'strong compression' result! I always tend to get 'weak' or 'mild' results. This also supports the direction that this investigation is heading - that this song is aimed at a more pop and commercial audience.
Finally, it's time to talk about the spectral field of the song. Without looking at a frequency meter my first description of the song would be very mid-rangy. I feel like in the choruses the backing vocals just swell up the mid range way too much and detract from the entire song. As a result of this it pushes the bass back in the mix and overpowers the high frequencies a little bit. Let's have a look at the spectral meter with the setting a slower setting applied.
The spectral analyser seems to support my hypothesis - the mid range is really prominent and is lacking top end and a bit of 'sparkle'. I feel like this track really could have used a boost in highs to create that really polished and slightly airy feel. It just seems like the mid frequencies are fighting for space when the top end could have been opened up and some of those frequencies funnelled into the top, freeing up the mids a little.
I hope this investigation was informative and interesting. I know I enjoyed it! Critically investigating the characteristics of songs can greatly help us identify what processes were used and evaluate what techniques are relevant and useful to our style and current projects. From this investigation I have discovered a range of processes and techniques which are relevant to my current projects. Such as; samples appeal to radio and commercial audiences, rhythm guitars sound good distorted behind a cleaner lead, backing vocals create swelling in the mid range very easily, top end frequencies add air and a polished feeling.
Until next time,
Brandon Hayward
