Actress and singer Alyson Michalka stars as Keely Teslow, Phil Diffy's best friend and the only person who can be trusted to keep his secret, in Disney Channel's live action series "Phil of the Future." Born March 25, 1989, Michalka began acting at age 5 in stage productions produced by churches her family attended outside Seattle, Washington, and in Thousand Oaks, California. She was featured in numerous musicals including "Jailhouse Rock" and "A Time to Remember." The talented teen was subsequently a featured soloist on two recordings for WORD Music, "Jailhouse Rock" and "Meet Me at the Manger."
Michalka, who plays piano and guitar, also writes music and sings with her younger sister Amanda in a pop music duo "Aly & A.J." The sisters are currently working in the recording studio with award-winning music producers Ray and Greg Cham (Disney Channel Original Movies "The Cheetah Girls," "Full Court Miracle").
When she's not acting, Michalka enjoys drawing. Her artistic talent was noticed by Hallmark Cards when, at just age 10, her greeting card design won the nationwide Hallmark Kids Card Contest. Lately, Michalka is interested in fashion and sewing and has plans to design a clothing line.
The Torrance, California native has two dogs, Saint and Bandit, and lives with her parents and sister in Los Angeles.
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These are some production notes on the song "Something More", if you are not a producer or a musician you may not be interested ...
So the key to excellent production in popular music, if I had to narrow it down to a single word, is "variation", definitely.
Today by chance I was doing some critical listening to "Something More", and I hear this -
First of all, from 0:01 to 0:10, there's so MANY things happening. I hear
*drums
*bass
*bell
*percussive synth, mallet-like sound
*morphing envelope synth
*fast riff on synth or guitar very low in the background
*envelope synth dives
*delay on some of these, and forget about the other ambience and processing - who knows!!
When A.J.'s vocal comes in, there's a guitar sample, a single note line, which is truncated every other time.
Right before the chorus at 0:30 they bring in a sustain dist guitar note playing whole notes, then a backing vocal, and if you listen right before the chorus slams in, a cleaner guitar is actually playing a complement to the perc synth's rigid 8th note descending melodic figure. But again, the genius lies in the fact that
*the guitar is not really audible the first time, 0:31 thru 0:34
*it kind of swells in the second time, gaining strength
*it plays something different (guitar on all A&AJ stuff is amazing)
*this little "2 bar" riff does not play thru all 8 beats. It stops cold 6 beats along, both times
THAT'S THE KIND OF S__T I LOVE.
That fast (arpeggiated?) synth low in the back, that's the kind of production thing that sometimes you can't even really hear, but you wonder why the sonic texture is interesting beyond what you think is only guitar, bass, drums and voice.
In the 1st chorus, (0:41) notice how the main guitars are playing power chords on 1 &, and 3 &, and there's other layered guitars playing "mutes" on 2e a, so there's this wonderful imbalance in there, pulling you along: ONE AND (2e a) THREE AND (4e a) etc. Niiiiiiiiice.
More genius - notice how on the 2nd half of the chorus, the mutes stop to make space for the awesomely cool Steve Vai-esque 8va doubled bends. And of course there's the cool lower voicing in the power chords... gotta love a drop 'D' tuning, always!!
Also notice the "mutes" are not really mutes, but melodic enhancement for the subdominant, the IV.
AND YOU ALSO MUST HEAR that during the entire chorus, but really audible during the second half, is this other way cool sustain guitar behind the power chords, playing the root way up there, probably like as a I5(no 3rd) kind of thing, or maybe it's just the single note but it sounds like something more (ha!), and that adds a very key constant aural tapestry to the background, as well as creating a reminder of the tonic, the I, which comes around again in the verse.
In the 2nd verse, they bring in a kind of cool ring-modulated synth. I always loved the ring modulator.
Now if you wanna really get into minutiae, well, first of all, there's the ticky timekeeper, the HH cymbal. (probably playing and programming, a little of both) It is so freakin slamming here.
Right in the beginning of the tune, and also after the 1st chorus at 1:00, you can clearly hear the HH playing all 16 notes, with wonderful variation in the ADSR params to really push everything.
But then at 1:06 when the 2nd verse vox start they switch to this whole
& a 2 & a 3 & a 4 & a 1
thing, mostly.
The brains behind it is the textural difference that makes each hit sound different... some are squishy and loose, some are tight, different samples and sounds entirely, and then of course they vary it with open HH as needed. Then there's the way they place the hits all over the stereo field, some of it center, some on the right, then the left, also promoting excellent feel of motion and the whole "zen trance beat experience". The one on the left is like a keyboard 'tink' or hard HH hit or something.
And I love the HH thing at 1:10 and 1:25 where they loop the sample right on top of itself.
Some other things worth mentioning is the guitar lines during the "middle 8" thing (2:06), where the distortion plays a line the first time around, and then clean guitar ascends with delay above it the second time, sounding like a piano. And did you catch the VERY KEY vocal effect on the lower harmony when they sing "We know what is false/And we know what is real..." at the end, when it sounds like she's gargling in a tunnel of watery reverb? Awesome.
I mean, I could definitely go on describing a ton of things here, but here's my point - Disney is SMART. These people don't sell a boatload of Miley Cyrus and Aly and A.J. music because it's just okay. They sell it by the freight load because
a) their colossal omnimedia/promotion machine gets it to you, but
b)WHEN YOU HEAR IT THEY KNOW, it's gonna sound SHA-WEET. I guess this is as good a time as any to say a heartfelt and sorrowful goodbye to Ray Cham. I don't know if this is his work on here, but it's his calibre of talent (writer, player and mix wizard) that I'm describing all throughout.
I learned an A&AJ song on guitar, "On the Ride", and lemme tell you, there's beautiful stuff inside this music. Just very cool voicings, playing, and variation. Not boring, that's for sure. Oh and, lyrically, I like it too; they write smart, cool, emotional content.
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