The third Gorillaz album, re-created using only kazoos.
On the day of the 9th anniversary of the album, I set myself the challenge of re-creating it using only kazoos, in time for the 10th anniversary. Why? I'm not sure. I'd made some previous kazoo covers, each time adding complexity to the arrangements. The logical progression of the half-joke seemed to be to take on some ridiculous project, and giving myself one year to recreate an entire album in detail while also completing my A-levels seemed stupid enough.
(Some behind-the-scenes video of the process is available in the playlist above)
Recording took place chiefly in one of the two small recording booths the college had built next to the toilets. These rooms always got really hot, smelt weird, and weren't soundproofed (I had to stop recording when someone was using the toilets). They each had a mac, a MIDI keyboard, and a nice condensor microphone, and were where I spent basically all of my free periods and break times for the almost two years I was at sixth form. I pretty much loved them.
Recording tracks became a pretty fine-tuned process after the first few. I'd start by listening to the original track a bunch while taking the train to and from college. I was lucky enough to find instrumental versions of every track on the album, courtesy of YouTube. These were invaluable in recreating the exact arrangement of the instruments, especially those further back in the mix (a trick I found occasionally useful was to heavily EQ the backing tracks to focus in on one particular part of the arrangement).
Once I was familiar with the tracks, I'd start recording some part which I could use to keep track of where I was in the song, such as a bassline or vocal part. Then would come the drums, which often consisted of hand claps for snares, chest thumps for bass drums, kazoos hit against each other for hi-hats, and mouth noises to fill out the sound (occasional guest percussion included the studio wall being slapped and a discarded water bottle being thumped). The bass kazoo would often follow, done bit by bit my memorising and repeating phrases from the actual track. Then came the chord instruments- usually synth pads or guitar. The harmonies would be added next, and finally would come the final main vocal.
As I didn't have a lot of time for this project, I cut a few corners- the biggest concession to convenience was extensive looping of parts. Drum parts and background pads suffer the most from this, but I don't think it detracts too much from the quality of the songs- they are kazoo covers after all. I applied double tracking, panning, effects and EQ to all of the parts to emulate the original track better and to generally improve the sound. Upgrading to Logic Pro X from GarageBand halfway through the project gave me an opportunity to start experimenting with some more interesting effects, although very few of these made it in to the final mixes, as I didn't get the hang of them in time.
In retrospect, some tracks really use too many effects, which buries the kazoo sound- something which a kazoo album probably shouldn't do. Doing something silly seriously is really funny (see Monty Python), but it's a fine line to walk. If you put too much effort in, it looks like you're not in on the joke, and you actually think what you're doing is serious 'high art', when in reality it's 'low'. This can make you look stupid, and should be avoided unless intended ironically (Spinal Tap's 'Stonehenge', for example).
No autotune or pitch correction was ever used while making this- every note heard on the tracks was sung that way. For some reason I'm proud of that fact. This album features attempts at both my lowest (Stylo bassline) and highest (To Binge) notes. If you think they sound a little dodgy, imagine walking by the recording booth without context... I got some funny looks while putting this together.
Videos weren't initially in the plan, but I realised quickly that I'd need to create some visual element if I wanted to put them on YouTube. For the majority of the videos, this was an image modelled after the single art for that song, if it had any. To add some visual variety, I'd apply various effects to this type of video (see Rhinestone Eyes or On Melancholy Hill), which worked ok. For visual consistency throughout the videos and other art, I bought a bunch of kazoos (which it turns out are very cheap in bulk) and dressed them up as the characters:
These characters were then photographed and used as assets to make the necessary art. I didn't end up using them as much as I would have liked to, as I didn't have time for many proper video recreations. Those that I did manage were some of the lower-effort ones, such as To Binge and Broken, both of which were somewhat unpleasant shooting experiences. For To Binge, I had to squat in a bathtub containing a mixture of water, milk, food colouring and orange juice. This gave me the cloudiness, but not quite the yellow look of the liquid in the music video, so I adjusted the colour in iMovie afterwards. As the white bath had to be revealed once the coloured water had drained, I slowly faded out the colour-changed video to a normal version as the video progressed, giving a half decent imitation of the original.
Above is the green screen I set up for the videos. It was used in Superfast Jellyfish, and extensively in Broken, where three green screen shots were layered on top of a changing background (emulating the live visuals for the song, which have been released as a music video for it on the Gorillaz YouTube Channel). Holding a kazoo up from the bottom of the screen while staying out of sight of the laptop camera necessitated holding some uncomfortable positions, but all was for a good cause, so I struggled through. This piece of green paper is still taped to my wall in my family home bedroom.
All visual editing was done in iMovie and Keynote (Apple's answer to PowerPoint).
A few more elaborate videos were made- Empire Ants, Plastic Beach, Glitter Freeze, Pirate Jet and Doncamatic (in ascending order of complexity) all took a basic visual element and then ran with it, some more than others. Doncamatic took a long while to make, because I had to shoot a video for every single song part (28* 3min46sec is a little under two hours), and then composite one video on to the final shot at a time (iMovie only supports one picture-in-picture, so I'd render a single added part out and then add a new one to the resulting file). A few videos were shot-for-shot recreations of the original music videos, these being Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach (pretty easy and fun to do) and Superfast Jellyfish (less easy, more fun). Rather than explain the videos any further, I'll let this video of various shots being taken show the rest:
Although no pitch correction was used on the songs, some of the rhythmic parts needed correcting. If my musical self was an RPG character, rhythm was my dump stat. Some chopping up in-DAW fixed the most glaring mistakes, and I left the rest in so that the tracks didn't seem too precise, which I feel would be against the spirit of a kazoo cover album. A few parts outright couldn't be done without help from the DAW, most obviously the arpeggiated hook in Plastic Beach, and the Morse code in Glitter Freeze.
The version of Pirate Jet takes after the live version, which I think kicks ass. The song is too short on the record, and the live build-up and sudden ending serve the song so well. To add to the feeling of increasing tension, various harmonies are introduced each time the single verse repeats, culminating in shouted words mixed in to the background towards the end, which were an effort to replicate the crowd chanting along.
Several songs were omitted, obviously. This was due to time constraints, and a lack of enthusiasm for Sweepstakes. I completed the songs in an order determined by their populatiry, my personal order of favourites, and how difficult they would be to do. Some Kind of Nature and White Flag would have been fun to do, but I ran out of time. Cloud of Unknowing would have been difficult, just because the timing's pretty loose and the harmonies are complex- it's a great song though, and at some point I plan on coming back to it and the other two. Sweepstakes is both difficult rhythmically, and less enjoyable a listen (until I listen to it a bunch more, anyway) than the others to me, so it's got the lowest priority.
I'm quite proud of this project. It's not technically complete, but it was such a long and sustained effort - and therefore such a specific state of mind to get into - that I'm not sure I'll ever return to it. The mixing isn't my best, but it's certainly not terrible. While the kazoos are sometimes buried under effects, they sound pretty good. A re-mix of it now would certainly have more treble, and would lower the volume of the main vocals a bit. They sound good in headphones, but less so on monitors or other speakers; that's a product of me mixing the whole album almost exclusively on headphones.
The timing was logically flawed, given that I should have been focusing on my A-levels. I was pretty thinly stretched by the end of it, but it helped me work off the stress from my academic work pretty well. In a way, COVID cancelling my exams was pretty good for my grades- they were calculated based on my academic record before I took on an extremely involved and time consuming project, and so painted me in a better light than any exam would have shown at the time. Furthermore, the skills and mindset I'd started to discover during this massive project would be further developed later in the COVID pandemic when I started recording my first album using the time lockdown afforded me. Thanks for that, COVID...? (that doesn't feel right)
The only slight disappointment with this album is that the hype I'd built up on r/gorillaz regarding this project (which wasn't substantial, but certainly wasn't nothing) led me to believe that I might stand a chance of getting some amount of exposure off of it when it released, which didn't end up being the case. Those who did see it really enjoyed it, and that was more than good enough for me. What really made me regard this project as a success was when upon watching the full thing, my Mum said she was 'properly impressed'. Transcending the unconditional pride parents feel towards their children to properly impress them as a musician playing to an audience is a validating feeling, and it gave me the confidence to start developing my own ideas with the aim of sharing them with others.
Plastic Beach - Kazoo Edition is available on YouTube and SoundCloud. It may end up on streaming services at some point, but I need to find out how uploading weird covers works first.