Call Me - Blondie (cover)

[John Bradley]

Call Me

The market has spoken. Back to the ‘80s stuff it is!

Note: I cheated a bit and dropped it from D to C#. The last note of the bridge (in the original key) requires hitting an E5, and while I can get to Eb5 (briefly), I’ve yet to find the amount and location of electrical shock required to make an E5 come out of my mouth. Could have stayed in the original key and ‘fixed’ the note in Melodyne, but a subset of the mix serves (in theory, at least) as a backing track for my band, so I need to be able to hit that note live, too.

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Drums: Session Drummer 3. Running my normal setup. 6 outputs (kick, snare, hat, toms, crash, ride). A BREVERB send on each. A “shell comp” send on the kick/snare/toms (BOZ Manic Compressor doing the grungy squashed parallel compression thing). A “cymbal comp” send on the crash and ride (ProChannel PC76 comp doing instantaneous (0ms) 8:1 compression to smooth them out). All going to a drum bus where a AudioDamage Rough Rider 3 (freebie!) does some additional parallel compression on the whole kit (mostly has the effect of boosting the reverb tails on the snare hits) and an Ozone 8 Vintage Limiter adds loud.

Bass: IKM's MODO Bass, P-bass model, direct out, running through a Blue Cat Axiom dual amp chain, one of them fairly fuzzy and the other not so much, plus a little room reverb.

Synths: An Arturia MINI provides the 8th triplet pattern that runs through the whole song. (The retriggers are happening in-VST, the actual midi in CW is just a series of held notes.) There’s an OP-X Pro II playing a high clavish part on the 2s and 4s starting after the first chorus, though it’s pretty well hidden in the final mix.

An Arturia B-3 organ briefly enters for the bridge, and then leaves again. It is not hidden in the mix. The solo is done on another Arturia MINI, running through a Valhalla Supermassive and a BREVERB. Finally, in the repeating choruses at the end there’s an Arturia Prophet playing a single note (D) on quarters, which has a Valhalla Delay on it.

Guitars: Three of them. Guitar 1 is playing the distorted, held chords in the R side, Guitar 2 is answering with the clean chorus high stabs in the L. Guitar 3 is provides the little lead bits (right up the middle) that occur during the interstitials and the bridge. All three recorded dry from my old Strat, running through Blue Cat’s Axiom.

Vocals: The lead vocal (verses and bridge) is single tracked and run through a Nectar 2 (gate / de-esser / compressor / saturation / harmony / EQ / limiter). The harmony module is doing the two-voice unison thing, panned l/r, with time & pitch variation for fake double-tracking. After that there’s a pair of EQs that get switched in/out via automation to correct for tonal differences between the different takes. There’s also a Valhalla Delay adding a subtle 1/8th triplet echo, and another BREVERB.

The other lead vocal (choruses) is double tracked for realsies. Each track goes through a Nectar 2 (same chain as the verse vocal, yes, including the harmonizer), into a Valhalla Delay running in Dual mode, doing 8th triplets on the L and 1/4s on the R side, and into a BREVERB (preset: Late Colour) which is where the really late and odd-sounding echo is coming from.

Backing Vocals: Three vocal ‘lines’ (they just say “Call me” at different pitches in answer to the lead vocal) , each double-tracked and panned l/r to varying degrees. Those go to a bus where iZotope’s Vocal Doubler (freebie?) does what it does, and a BREVERB (preset: A Capella Vox) adds quite a bit of sloshy wetness.

Melodyne Studio 4: Big heaping slabs of it.

As usual, a GW MixCentric and Ozone 8 on the master to add a little bit of 'magic' and loud, respectively.

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Previous Releases: Take Me Down to the Infimary  •  Harder to Breathe  •  Dirty Laundry  •  Paradise by the Dashboard Light  •  Ashes to Ashes  •  Lies  • Enter Sandman  •  Wanted Dead or Alive  •  Too Much Time on My Hands  •  Are You Gonna Go My Way?  •  Blue Monday '88  •  Fame  • One of Our Submarines