Tycho - A Walk Dissection
- Jordan Aston
- Apr 30, 2019
- 5 min read
Introduction/Background
Scott Hansen, known professionally as Tycho, is an American musician, composer, songwriter and producer. He is also known as ISO50 for his photographic and design work. His music is a combination of downtempo vintage-style synthesizers and ambient melodies. His sound is very organic, often incorporating clips of human elements into his songs (e.g. weather broadcasts, simple talking, or breathing). Inspired by the likes of artists such as Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss, on this track ‘A Walk’ from the record ‘Dive’, Tycho sets out to capture of feeling of nostalgia and longing. The album ‘Dive’ is essentially an instrumental, concept album that aims to capture a similar feeling or emotion with each track. Hansen creates his own wistful and melancholy artwork to help capture the sentiment and endorse the music he writes.
Track: A Walk
Artist: Tycho
Album: Dive
Label: Ghostly International
Producer: Scott Hansen
Engineer: Scott Hansen and Tycho
Recorded at: Home Studio
Released: November 8, 2011
Tempo: 140bpm
Key: D
Signature: 4:4
Song Length: 5:17
Genre: Chill-wave/ Ambient/ Post-Rock/ Electronica
Arrangement
The song begins with a dreamy lead synth hook that sets the pace of track. Next to come in is bass guitar and egg shakers followed by the drum pattern that opens the song right up. Some spacey sound effects and a high register lead synth riff appear and let you know the song is in full swing by this point. The musicality is very thematically similar throughout the entire song which adds to the haziness of the composition. The piece is quite progressive and doesn’t seem to have an obvious structure but rather uses the technique of layering and undressing drawn-out sections to create waves of intensity. In my opinion the arrangement of the song could be laid out like this:
Intro | Part A | Break | Part B/ Outro
However, each one of these sections lends certain aspects of themselves to the other sections, such as the bass-lines, drum patterns and padded synths. The instrumentation seems to work around a central idea from beginning to end and shifts slowly to give the song movement.
Instrumentation
Similar to most songs on the record, A Walk has a fairly rudimentary instrumental makeup. It’s what Scott can do with these instruments that gives the mix such a boundless amount of texture. To list out the instruments on this track from listening, there are a number of synths creating pads in the background and lead lines in the foreground. A bass guitar drives the song and gives it movement. Guitars are very subtle and work as embellishments here and there. The loudest instrument you can here are the drums which sound like they are acoustic samples since they are so incredibly precise and processed. In sections, you can faintly hear a light tambourine that comes in and out to lift the mix up.
Sonic Content/ Techniques
It’s hard to find online information on how Hansen recorded this track specifically, or what analogue or digital processing he has done. So, I will use information I can find on how he produced the album as a whole and use my ears to dissect what I can hear on this track. The first idea I had was to pull up the track in Ableton and take a look at the stereo field throughout the song using a plugin called Stereo Tool v3 by Flux. To my surprise, I noticed that the song as a whole has quite a narrow stereo width. It’s always been an objective of mine to widen my mixes as much as possible on every mix I do, which is curious and has made me wonder how this track can sound so large while being narrow in a stereo sense. After listening to the track from start to finish while watching the stereo tool, I can tell that it’s the synths and time-based effects that are widening the stereo field towards the end of the song. See image below.
Almost every aspect of this song is compressed with a bit of force. Especially the guitars and synths. The reverb tails on each sound are very long and hold on for quite some time which sounds like he has set up a send for the reverb and compressed it a lot while adding slight compression on the instrument tracks themselves. I love that he uses a bass guitar on most of his tracks to add the ‘human’ element in what is a somewhat electronic environment. The bass guitars are very nicely distorted and EQ’d in such a way that they don’t get lost in the mix. From doing a little research I’m aware that Tycho use ‘Guitar Rig’ to get their DI’d guitar sounds, so the use of microphones or recording anything acoustically are probably trivial on this record.
The Synth Riff
I am really interested in how he created the introductory lead synth riff so I opened Massive to see what I could do to re-create it. It’s quite a clean sounding synth so I began simply with one oscillator using a sine-square wave. I Then went to envelope 4 and turned the release up to make to notes drag out a little longer. Next, I took a look at the attack on the envelope. When it’s at 0 you can hear a sort of ‘pop’ sound that’s unwanted. I dialled up the attack just until the point where the pop goes away because it sounds like there’s still low attack in the actual song but it’s soft sounding kind of like a xylophone. The last thing I did in massive was turn down the low shelf just a little to get rid of some of the ‘boomyness’. That’s pretty much it on the instrument now the rest of sound make up is done with effects.
The next thing I did was add a compressor at the beginning of the signal chain. I used a piano pre-set that comes with the waves CLA-2A. It’s all I thought needed to get it started. Tycho uses very nice analogue gear and records to tape a lot of the time. Since I don’t have analogue gear or a tape machine I tried to replicate the vintage, warm analogue tone of this synth line by adding a waves Kramer Master-Tape plugin and dialled in the flutter and noise knobs until it resembled that of the original synth. I boosted the ‘record level’ quite a lot to give it more of a saturated/ drive tone as well. To add a bit of colour I slowed down the delay time on the tape plugin and turned up the feedback to add to the ‘spacey vibe’.
Listening to the track over and over and comparing, it sounded like I now needed to do some subtractive EQing to shape it more like the synth I’m trying to emulate. I HPF’d at about 100Hz and and with a tight Q I dropped a little out of 2k. To make it sound a little more realistic and like it’s coming from an amplifier, one more gain stage was added using a simple ‘OneKnob’ saturator. I was pushed just a little bit so it didn’t overdrive the signal but added a little bit gain or ‘thickness’. It’s pretty close at this point but I then set up an effects bus to add the most important effects of all.
I added a reverb on the bus to give it the roomy/ shimmery/ shiny feel and boosted the decay time to about 12/13 seconds to give it a nice long ambient tail. Tycho is well known for his vast sounds which is definitely owed to smashing reverbs. Last but not least I added a chorus effects to give it the ‘warble’ sound and thicken it up once again followed by another compressor right at the end to ensure the reverb decay time doesn’t die out too soon. That finalises the re-creation and breakdown of Tycho’s synth patch on A Walk! Which I can now use in any of my electronic songs.
References
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