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How I Made "That Day" (and Why I Kept Every Mistake)

  • 22. Juli
  • 5 Min. Lesezeit

The Human Frequency — Notes on making music by hand in the age of AI

By Roger Ricks


Last time I told you there was one sound in my music that could never come from a machine, something that is technically a flaw, and I promised I would show you exactly where it lives. This is me keeping that promise. My new single, "That Day," is out now, and honestly it is full of those flaws. Every single one of them is there on purpose, and I want to tell you why.


The moment behind the song


"That Day" is about the kind of moment that quietly splits your whole life into a before and an after. I have lived through a few of them. One was standing on the platform at the train station in Sargans, twelve years old, being told that my father had died. Another one, years later, was the first time I looked into the eyes of the woman who would become my wife and watched them light up. One of the darkest days I have ever had and one of the brightest, and the strange thing is they work in exactly the same way. You arrive as one person and you leave as another, and nothing afterward is quite the way it was before. That feeling, that hinge that a life turns on, is the whole song.


Why I didn't chase perfect

The song came fast, which does not always happen to me. And when it came time to sing it, I did not sit there grinding out a hundred takes hunting for the flawless one. What you hear is basically the first few passes, the ones where I was actually inside the feeling instead of standing outside of it watching myself work. English is not my first language, so there are a couple of words in there that I do not pronounce perfectly. I genuinely sat with the question every producer asks himself sooner or later. Should I go back, record it again, make it cleaner and tighter and more correct? I decided not to. The moment I re-recorded it to fix my own mouth, I would lose the one thing I actually care about, which is that a real person was sitting there feeling all of it in real time.


The flaws I left in on purpose

And it is not only the accent. There is a guitar in there that fades out a hair too early. There are background vocals that come in a tick before they really should. Hand this track to most engineers and they would tidy up every one of those little things, and I understand the urge completely, because part of me wanted to as well. But I kept landing on the same thought. Fixing them would not have made the song mean any more. It would only have made it more perfect. And those two things are not the same at all. A spotless version of "That Day" would actually be a smaller thing than the messy one, because there would be less of me left inside it.

And honestly, I am in pretty good company with this. When Pink Floyd recorded "Echoes," David Gilmour plugged a wah pedal in backwards by accident and got a strange, screeching, seagull-like sound, and instead of fixing the mistake he fell in love with it and kept it, and today it is one of the most famous guitar sounds in rock. On "Hey Jude," Paul McCartney hit a clunker on the piano and muttered a swear word under his breath, and John Lennon insisted they leave it buried low in the mix on purpose. Most people never even hear it, but it is in there forever. Not one of those records is worse for the mistake. They are more human because of it.

I even thought about asking someone to sing it with me, a second voice to help carry the weight of it. In the end I wanted to carry it alone. This one sits too close to my chest to hand any piece of it to somebody else.


Why any of this matters

We have arrived at a strange point in history where you can generate a clean, mistake-free song faster than you can make yourself a coffee. So the flawless take is not the rare and precious thing anymore. It is the cheapest thing going. What is actually rare now is the small human error that tells you a particular person, with a particular life behind them, was really in the room when this was made. That is not a defect I need to quietly patch out. On this song it might be the entire point of the exercise.

So when you put "That Day" on, I want you to listen for the mistakes. The word I do not quite land. The guitar that lets go a moment too soon. That is not me being sloppy. That is a person refusing to be sanded down into something smooth and anonymous.

You can hear "That Day" for yourself right here. See how many of my imperfections you can catch.


One last thing before you go

Next time I want to make the bigger argument, the one I actually believe with my whole chest: that these imperfections are not just honest, they might be the single most valuable thing an independent artist has left in the age of AI. And somewhere further down the road I will tell you the rest of the Sargans story, the years that came after that platform, and how a guitar quietly ended up saving my life. But that is a story for another day.

For now, tell me this in the comments: what is a song that matters to you not because it is perfect, but precisely because it is not?


Sources & further reading (where they actually tested this)

 
 
 

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