Intravenous (Hospitals Suck 2011 rework)

"Rice-o-nators"[1] on the drums.

Intravenous (Hospitals Suck 2011 rework)

"When life gives you IV drugs, be sure to make samples" - Me

The sound you are hearing is a sample of an IV pump in a hospital room. I was connected to it at the time, as a result of an emergency appendectomy in 2009. The rhythm of it's little pin roller resetting is the basis for the entire track.

These are the things you do when you're a sound obsessed individual, out of your gourd on that good medical hooch, and you just happened to pack a mic and headphones with your laptop.

Any television executives who are interested in licensing this track as a title for ... I dunno ... let's say a show about adventurous doctors who are also comedic police and dramatic lawyers ... drop me a line, baby. Have your people call my people. Let's do things.

I made this track shortly after the hospital stay back in 2009, and I posted it on myspace. You can still hear the old version over there on the plurgid page, if you can find it. There were some things about that original mix I never cared for, specifically a really harsh hiss in the vocoded beat texture thing, but I left if up there and to be honest I'd completely forgotten about it until yesterday.

Out of the blue, Bill sent me an email last week mentioning it. I thought to myself "I should fix that thing, it was a pretty good track", and so that's pretty much what I had a blast doing the last few days. After I cleaned up the vocoder, then I thought "hmm, it needs some stutters and effects", then I thought "this needs drums", etc, and so on and so on.

Here it is, the 2011 re-work of 2009's "Hospitals Suck" a song that came entirely out of a cool sounding IV pump and the drugs it was putting in my system at the time, which made me think it sounded so cool.

[1] "Rice-o-nators" on the drums
I have found that the resonance of the toms on my drum kit creates a sort of crappy sounding reverb when hitting other drums, like the kick or snare. When it comes to crappy sounding reverbs, I prefer to add them at my discretion via cheap digital plugins, or home-made analog slinky-verbs, because frankly that's just how I roll.

I have literally no idea what the proper solution to this problem is. My guess is it's some combination of not having a crappy beginner kit, and tuning the toms correctly. Let's face it, I'm not buying a new kit anytime soon, and I'm for damn sure not going to kill my vibe by spending an hour tuning the toms.

Dig it sucka, make yo' self some rice-o-nators out of a couple socks and a few cups of rice. Hang 'em over the rim as shown. Kills resonance like raid kills roaches, mang!