Listening Log - Ray Charles - Mess Around

Listening Log - Ray Charles

This song starts with a jolly sounding piano sequence which lasts around 6 seconds. It is a short piano sequence that is repeated four times before it breaks into a classic jazz sounding track. This part is where drums and bass are introduced. An original sounding jazz snare tapping sound plays throughout the song, and the vary of high to low bass plucking creating a funky sound. This lasts for the opening 19 seconds of the song before Charles' voice comes in accompanied with a jazz trumpet sounding brass instrument.

Charles voice sounds comfortably strained, with an almost croaky tone. This is a skill of his and a distinctive feature in his voice. 

During the piano solo at 1:15 there are some trills in the right hand and block chords in the left hand. The saxophone solo at 1:37 is basic just keeping in time of the beats of the bar with some improvisation playing. The song is melody and accompaniment the whole way through.

The recording sounds like it was recorded with one microphone at the front recording all of the instruments at the same time, with a separate microphone for the lyrics. This means that some instruments such as the drum are quiet as they are further away from the microphone. I would have close miced the drum kit and had the bass and saxophone and piano on its own separate microphones. This would mean that all instruments are equally loud and you would have more control over how loud you want each instrument. If you were using just the two microphones with one for the vocals and the rest for the instruments then it would mean that if you wanted one instrument higher than the rest you would either have to raise the gain on the microphone which would increase every other instrument as well or use EQ to raise certain frequencies to make a certain instrument louder. This would however mean that other instruments that have similar frequencies would be louder as well. However, this track was recorded aquite a while ago, and the availability of technology was limited.

However, it is still a tune.