Nate's Blog

Round 25 of Everyone Plays the Same Song is Hella Good by No Doubt, so I have to cover it by the end of the quarter. I've got about a month, and have barely started. I've done a lot of thinking, and now it's time for doing.

Stylistic Inspiration

Hella Good by No Doubt is a pretty sinister sounding song. It also doesn't move, melodically, nearly at all. The chorus is catchy as hell though.

My initial ideas were to either make something wall-of-soundy, indexing on "feeling hella good", or to make something super dancy, indexing more on "keep on dancing."

In my aimless search for inspiration, I ran across you'll come back by jigitz.

I've listened to the song countless times over the last few weeks, and have broken ground, albeit barely, on covering Hella Good in this general style.

Elements of Hella Good

1. Steady drum beat.
2. The bass line that serves as the underlick melody
3. That chunking, duhduhduh duhduhduh duhduhduh guitar part. The only time it's not playing is during that bridge section
4. That falling note sound. There's a specific one that plays regularly, and then throughout the songs there will be different one-off falling pitches - used for transitions out of choruses.
5. The strummed guitar party that matches the underlick bassline
6. Rhythmic upbeat boops. Cool hook part in the chorus.
7. Gwen Stefani breathing really heavy
8. Buzzy bassline that takes on a major roll in the chorus and bridge section.

Elements of You'll Come Back

1. pitched up vocals
2. super fast delay at the end of lines. "Hold me tongue, I'm brokenkenkenkenkenkenkenken"
3. Sparse verses /w plenty of reverb and damped highs
4. Super long reverb tail transitions
5. Super fast arpeggios in the chorus
6. Cutting the punchy kick from everywhere but the chorus, save the final into the final chorus. CONTRAST.
7. Rhythmic synth sounds.

Putting them together

Here's a sketch of the chorus.

Next I'm going to block out the individual sections in my Ableton Live session for the intro, chorus, verses etc to get the full structure of the song. From there I'll work on dynamics and instrumentation, as well as recording my vocals.