Wah Yantee from Transmission by mantramatic

About Wah Yantee:

Wah Yantee was the first track to be recorded, because it is the first clearly “musical” mantra in the sadhana (the series of mantras). True, the Adi Mantra and Long Ek Ong Kar both come before Wah Yantee on the album, but when I first started working on the album I hadn’t figured out how to make these musical, since they are traditionally (in the Yogi Bhajan tradition, at least) chanted without musical accompaniment--this changed later when I finally got around to recording these mantras, which ironically ended up being the last tracks I recorded--this was partly because I just didn’t know what to do with them at first.

The Sessions

The recording sessions for Wah Yantee were my first time in a real studio. I had been recording in my home studio, which was good preparation, but going into a real recording studio was a big adjustment. We initially set up my Fishman amplifier in an isolation room and miked that, sending it the signal from the Fishman pickup mounted in my Gurian steel string, my main guitar for many decades. I was still thinking of recording more as performance rather than as multi-track recording. We also set up several other mics, one in front, one over the shoulder. So there were quite a few guitar signals coming into the board that Bob, my engineer, had to work with. After that first track we dropped using the miked amp as I was able to understand there was no real need for it. Bob let me have it initially as sort of a security blanket.

This maiden-voyage session was in October 2018. At that time I had no idea how long it would take to record the album, how it would go, if it would ever get finished, how much it would cost, or much of anything in general. I just knew I had an opportunity to get started on it so I hit the go button. As it turned out, the entire project took a bit over a year, which wasn’t so bad considering my complete lack of experience in the studio, the fact that I was also working full-time and doing a lot of other things besides music, took months off at a time for travel, and had a pandemic strike just as the recording sessions were wrapping up--miraculously, we were literally the last session before the studio shut down for a bit in early 2020.

The Percussion

Another of the main challenges for this first track (besides my general lack of studio experience) was the percussion. I had a pretty firm idea of what I wanted for the percussion. I didn’t think drums were right for this album, but definitely felt that percussion was critical. But I didn’t have a percussionist. So I started to understand that loops could be integrated with the live music to create the percussion sound that I had in my head. I knew I couldn’t play percussion well enough to play it live either, although I did begin to contribute some live udu on later tracks, like Sat Siri Siri Akal. I had never arranged loops nor played live with a click track or anything as unforgiving as a loop. Live percussionists can alter the tempo slightly to compensate for less that perfect timekeeping by the guitarist, and my timekeeping had never been really rock-steady, more organic would perhaps be a polite way to put it.

I had already been working with a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in my home studio, and I started figuring out how to combine loops to create percussion tracks that sounded like what I wanted. I started with the udu, pretty much by just auditioning loop after loop until I found a sound I liked. I had run across a really great percussion player, Pete Lockett, during some internet searching, and wanted to get a sound like his on my album. He was pretty far out of my league, having played with pretty much everybody who’s anybody, but he did create a set of loops for Loopcloud, so I bought the set and started auditioning all the various exotic instruments, most of which I had never heard of.

Anyway, somehow the udu really stood out as being the right first thing, very Zen, so that formed the basis for the percussion for Wah Yantee and in some ways has become my favorite percussion instrument. I would create the percussion track and bring it in to the studio, Bob would play it while I played the basic rhythm guitar track, and that would form the basis for the whole rest of the song. Since it was the basis it had to be perfect, and that turned out to be really hard. The first session or two set the tone for much of the rest of the recording. I would bring in the percussion track, then attempt to play with it, and after a couple of less than perfect takes, we would hang it up and I’d come back a week or two later after a lot of home-based drilling, and nail it. Eventually I got a lot better at playing with loops, but at first it was very challenging.

One of those moments of enlightenment came while I was working on getting the guitar to fit with the udu for this track. I had tried writing out the rhythm charts, I had tried everything. Somehow it finally all came together in my head as that initial three-beat dut-dut-dut that starts the song--I realized in a very deep way that those three beats continued through the whole track, that they were literally the heartbeat of the tune. After that it was easier.

After the initial udu track, which is what we used for the basis of recording everything else, I added some shakers to the overall track and some tablas to the end of each round. This pattern I repeated for most of the rest of the tracks, setting up some basic instrument for the main percussion sound, adding a shaker or rattle or two, and punctuating the rounds with some other percussion.

The Vocals

The vocals for this track were imagined as a call-and-response, with my voice taking the initial solo melody line, then the female harmony response repeating it--this pattern repeats for the first three sets of lines. Then all the voices come together in the fourth line and for the rest of the round. This pattern reinforces the essentially tantric nature of the mantra, which implies male and female energies coming together. In the mantra, the voices symbolize this energetic pattern, so when you listen to the mantra, and especially when you chant along with it, your energetic patterns are also brought into this tantric alignment. Each person embodies both male and female energies, to different degrees, and tantric yoga is concerned with bringing these energies into harmony. Again, the physical manifestation of the energy as vibration and sound enables you to practice a very esoteric form of energy work in a very simple and physical way.

The Rhythm Guitar

The basic rhythm guitar track for this mantra was a fairly straightforward folk-type arrangement of chords. The song starts in A minor, which gives it a bit of that minor feeling of almost-sad longing, appropriate for a mantra that invokes the God-energy of the universe. As it progresses the one odd chord is an F major 7, which feels more expansive and resolves the minor chords. There is some more back-and-forth between the F major 7 and a straight F chord, which also set the theme for a good many of the other tracks. One of the musical aims of this album was to keep the repetitive, meditative, cyclical nature of the mantras, but also to add musical interest and texture, which also tends to help one concentrate when chanting with the mantras. One of the ways this was achieved was this mixing of different forms of the same chord within the songs.

After we had recorded a good version of the basic rhythm guitar track (this implied that it fit with the basic percussion loop, so any other percussion added later could be layered in fairly easily), we could move on to recording the lead vocal. This was always pretty easy and generally would just take one take, which was always a relief after pounding on the rhythm track for a couple of hours to get it right. The next track to be added was the lead.

The Leads

Usually I would take the rhythm tracks home, load them into my home studio DAW, Reaper, plug my guitar in to the board, and start trying to fit something in. For Wah Yantee I initially wanted to begin the song with a very short signature lead part that sort of captured the overall feel of the song. So the first 12 or so beats of the song is just pure rhythm and percussion, again that 3-beat thing, then you can hear the lead come in for the next 12 or so beats--this was inspired by various artists, but probably most particularly by Jerry Garcia--for instance, if you listen to the "Europe 72" live version of "Brown-Eyed Women," he opens with this very low-key lead that sets the tone for the whole rest of the song. So that’s what I wanted to do, basically capture the whole essence of the song in a couple of notes.

Then I started just following the melody line with the guitar, much like a second response vocal part, for the first couple of lines. The leads actually do provide the equivalent of the vocal call-and-response for the first round of the mantra, because the female harmonies don’t come in until the second round. Then I begin mixing in some higher-register arpeggiated chords, triads, and some slides up the neck that imply the rising energy in the mantra. So I tried to suggest that energy movement with the leads.

I also noticed when I listened to some early versions of the leads that a couple of things really stood out--glissandos and harmonics at the ends of phrases--so I intentionally emphasized those in later takes. The overall leads are more or less the same throughout the song, but with very slight and subtle variations, enough so that you can easily tell it’s definitely not looped. From the start we were determined to play everything live all the way through. Of course there were a few takes with minor errors that we just fixed by punching in those parts rather than re-recording the whole take, but most of the leads were completed “of a piece,” as it were. This to me implied some continuity and solidity to the lead voice of the guitar, and Bob, my engineer was of the same mind, so he helped keep me on the tracks when I started to go off sometimes.

One of my obsessions for this album was to use the same guitar for everything, my old Gurian steel string. This was true for the lead parts as well as for the rhythm parts, and with just a few exceptions later in the project this was true. So all the lead parts on the album were played on the steel string, with close miking in the studio to capture all the nuances of the guitar’s voice. The gamelan players in Bali believe very literally that their instruments are inhabited by spirits, and I think that the Gurian has a very definite spirit living in it. It’s one of a kind.

After getting the leads right at home it was usually fairly straightforward to go into the studio and get them recorded properly. Then it was on to the bass parts and female vocals.

The Bass and Backing Vocals

These were usually done in the same session together, since the whole rest of mantramatic for this album (except for our special guest artists) was my old friend John Connelly on bass and his girlfriend and her sister for the female vocals. Basically John would come in without a chart and just listen to the track, then plug straight in to the board and play the bass part, and usually got it in one take. For Wah Yantee the bass pretty much follows the roots of the chords. Of course we’d played all these tracks hundreds of times in my living room over the previous couple of years, so there wasn’t much need to practice. The girls, likewise, would nail the backing vocals on the first take, and their harmonies always just blew me away. They did all their own vocal arrangements. Bob would set them up facing each other in the studio with a sound baffle between them, so they could hear each other in the headphones and also see each other, so they did their parts together, sort of a semi-live arrangement.

The Ending

Beginnings and endings are always a little hard and sometimes ungainly, like a swan trying to take flight--good once it gets going, but a bit awkward on takeoff. So it is with songs. I’d conceived the ending of Wah Yantee as a ritardando (or more simply, just slowing down semi-randomly), and that’s what we ended up with. The problem was the semi-random nature of the rhythm guitar part, which everything else depended on. After I listened to it, I told Bob that I thought we would have to re-record it, and maybe just the whole thing, but he insisted it would be OK. I didn’t see how anybody could really follow it. So of course everybody else came in and nailed their parts and it sounded great. After that I tended to capitulate to Bob’s analysis even more than I had initially.

The Mix

After all that it was pretty much up to Bob to mix. About a week or so after the final session he would upload a mix to Dropbox, and I would audition it, and they were always spot on. I think only once or twice during the whole process we had to revisit a mix to make everybody happy. He is an amazing recording and mixing engineer and always had level-headed advice to give when things would seem to hit a snag. Definitely I consider him a member of the band, at least on loan from the studio. And at that, mantramatic is a dynamic, flowing thing, not exactly a band so much as whoever happens to be involved at the moment. Sort of being here now.

So Wah Yantee being my first track for the album and first time in the studio, and not my only responsibility at that time, took awhile. The recording sessions continued from October 2018 through the end of the year, then after the holidays (when nothing project-like has much of a chance) in January Bob completed the mix. So our first track, Wah Yantee, was in the can. Just 8 more to go.

Jiwan Shakti and mantramatic make mantra music for the new millennium. They combine trad mantra with folky neo-psychedelic for a transcendent listening experience.

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