Producing Eggshell

Maybe my proudest production moment… the transition from “Beautiful Heartbreak” into “Silver Lining” (from the 2002 collection of songs by myself and Mike Standal, Life Is What You Take It) was a fun idea that came out of nowhere and quickly consumed our week.

I knew Mike and I had written the intro and verses for Silver Lining in 7/8. We were searching for a way to end Beautiful Heartbreak, and I got to thinking that these two songs were closely related - Beautiful Heartbreak about finding the good in a bad situation, and Silver Lining about yes, there may be a silver lining, but it can be inside a big fucking cloud. So I wanted to tie them together somehow, and asked Mike what the last chord of Beautiful Heartbreak was. Then it was “hey Mike, what does Silver Lining start with?” The same one?! Eureka!

We came up with the ending figure in 7 for Beautiful Heartbreak on acoustic guitar, but were left with the problem of the two songs being wildly different tempos. So I recorded the acoustic guitar into Logic, chopped up every note using Recycle, sampled it with Logic’s sampler, arranged for the tempo during the outro of Beautiful Heartbreak to rise up to the tempo of Silver Lining, then added some filter automation and attack envelope mods on the sampled guitar part as the tempo speeds up. We recorded the guitar-to-processed-guitar transition on the end of the Beautiful Heartbreak master and lined up the first drum beat of Silver Lining during mastering.

I think it totally works, and it stands as my proudest technical achievement in the studio, I’d say.