Here's a new section where we talk about how we do what we do.

Fancy Ultra•Fresh by The Duke
In this section, I'd like to talk a bit about some of the behind-the-scenes making of Fancy Ultra*Fresh, and give you some inside details on the songs, and the audio production that made them sound the way they do.

There was never a definitive start to the making of the album.  Some of the songs predate those that appear on the FIF ep.  "Tonight" was the first song on the cd to get underway. I remember sitting in the lobby of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel back in 2001 for the first Synthcon Festival writing the bass line for "Tonight" and people coming up to me and asking if that was really the QY70!  I had started writing songs for various comps and Liz wanted to work on a video and the next thing we knew, we had a small collection of songs that sounded cohesive and were on our way to making our next album.   We never approach the songwriting with a specific them or direction in mind.  We just see what lyrics and songs we come up with!  Sometimes we start songs and lyrics that just don't fit the "freezepop vibe" but this is rare since the element of randomness in the song themes is a big part of our sound.  During the making of Fancy Ultra*Fresh, I also went through several stages of increasing the complexity of the production and mix processes as well, mostly in the aim of having more active changes in the songs, and having the sonic palettes be more diverse and chock full of cool little details.  I use the QY70 only in pattern mode, so the programming I come up with can get pretty repetitive. I originally relied on new sounds entering the mix on a constant basis to reduce the repetitive feel, but this got to be not enough and I wanted to have more programming changes as well.

1. Stakeout -  Stakeout was one of the earliest songs started for FU*F, and we knew right away that we had a gem of a pop song.  It's a love song that has a cool obsessive edge to it, and also proved to be a great song to make a video for since the lyrics provide so many memorable images.  The song itself is pretty straightforward melody-wise, but has a different arrangement than your standard verse/chorus pop arrangement,  and the difference in the chord progressions between the verse and the choruses were a bit difficult at first to make work. But now I really like the abruptness in the chords between those 2 sections.   There was also a songwriting technique that I wanted to try out and Stakeout seemed like a good song for that.  I'm a huge fan of Abba, and also of the band Weezer, and both wrote/write really poppy songs.  Often they create a melody for a verse section, that also comes in later in the song, say over  a chorus section, and the key is that they both work together, both in key and melody.  I find this to be a really satisfying sound, and it creates a layer of different melodies all happening at the same time.  I wanted to take this to a higher level by having the different melodies of the song all having the ability to be layered at the same time and still work together. Here is how the song is laid out:
1. Intro
2. Verse 1 (talking section)
3. Verse 1 instrumental - this section provides the buffer between the verse and chorus vocal melodies
4. Chorus 1 - "boys will come and boys will go..."
5. Chorus 1 tag - "i'm on a stakeout..."
6. Instrumental break
7. Verse 2 (talking section)
8. Verse 2 instrumental
9. Bridge - "watching and waiting..."
10. Chorus 2 - extended
11. Outro
The key here was to have the melodies from the chorus, the chorus tag, and the bridge all be able to work together.  During the last chorus of the song, you hear these 3 parts come in and all work together seamlessly.  They do overlap, but each kind of has its own sonic space.

Stakeout is also a good example of an early song going through some production changes and getting re-recorded during the making of the album.   The tracks were initially recorded into the computer at 16bit, with the stereo stems being the drums, bass, and synth sounds.  Then I added the vocals and vocoder on top and mixed it.  But as I began to work on new songs and the album's production got more complex as each new song was worked on, I realized that Stakeout was starting to suffer from the lack of these cool, new features that were making it into the newer songs.  I had also switched over to recording only at 24bit, so I took the opportunity to go back to Stakout, and make some changes. I re-recorded all the stereo tracks separately (4 tracks  of drums, 3 bass tracks, 6 synth tracks) along with the multiple vocals and vocoder tracks.  This let me go into each of the tracks and do a lot more production, processing, and new programming on them.  This made the song have more subtle changes throughout the song.  I also experimented with recording some of the drum tracks through the vocoder which added nice percussive synth elements.