Tycho - Hours Dissection

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 ‘Hours’ 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.

Tycho - Hours single artwork.

Track: Hours

Artist: Tycho

Album: Dive

Label: Ghostly International

Producer: Scott Hansen

Engineer: Scott Hansen and Tycho

Recorded at: Home Studio

Released: November 8, 2011

Tempo: 120bpm

Key: Ab

Signature: 4:4

Song Length: 5:44

Genre: Chill-wave/ Ambient/ Post-Rock/ Electronica

Tycho - Dive album artwork.

Arrangement

The song begins with a dreamy and heavily effected pad that drags out to introduce the song. High-hats and snare are the next layer to be introduced quickly followed by a rolling bass-line and a four to the floor kick drum pattern. 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 | Bridge/ Break | Part B | Break | Part A/ 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.

Track laid out in Ableton.

Instrumentation

Scott Hansen in his home studio.

Similar to most songs on the record, Hours 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.

Stereo Tool by Flux monitoring the stereo width from the beginning to end of track.

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.

References

• Reynaldo, S. (2014, April 2). Artist Tips - Tycho Details How to Get Quality Tones Without the Use of an Amp. Retrieved from https://www.xlr8r.com/gear/artist-tips-tycho-details-how-to-get-quality-tones-without-the-use-of-an-amp

• Reynaldo, S. (2012, June 30). In The Studio: Tycho. Retrieved from https://www.xlr8r.com/gear/in-the-studio-tycho