For all who are interested, the weekend was a great success. Lizzy proudly and joyously communed, we had a super party and saw a bunch of family and friends. Jeannie’s dad brought a whole bunch of Mexican beers. My parents came into town for the weekend, as did my brother Martin and his girlfriend Kathleen. Thanks to Martin for lending me his bari sax. I’ll be sure to put it some use before I return it. I can think of a song I have that would make a good bari feature. A sort of Duke Ellington meets Alice In Chains number.
The only downside of late has been the absolutely beautiful, perfect spring weather. Oh the irony! My allergies have been so bad that I’ve been measuring the time I spend outside. I gave up on trying to fix my car Sunday it was so bad. Even in midtown Manhattan, where you’d think nothing green is growing, I can feel it. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, which ought to bring some relief, and if past experience is any guide, it’ll be tapering off soon.
The main topic for the week is that I’ve posted a rough mix of my new song Heat Wave. You can listen to it here. It came out pretty good if I say so myself. At this point the tracking is done, except for maybe a wee punch-in here or there, and the levels and effects are roughed in. Still todo is the actual mixing — riding the faders to bring up and down the different parts, and finalizing the effects. The point of this is to sculpt and shape the sound, make the voices blend where they should and stand out where they should.
I might also add one or two more keyboard tracks. One would be to replace the synth part with a take that’s a bit more jamming. The other would be to add something like a clav part, to help fill in for the lack of guitar. But on the other hand, maybe the arrangement is thick enough and it doesn’t need that. I’ll give it a few listens and decide.
It’s a pretty fat mix as it is. I think I used twenty two tracks, plus effects buses. A lot of stuff is double tracked. The drums are on six tracks, with the kick on one, the snare doubled on 2 and 3 with two different samples, cymbals on 4, hihat on 5, and hand claps on 6. Since the drums are all MIDI, I could conceivably do it all on a single track, but this gives me the kind of control you’d have over real drums, to bring up and down and pan the instruments of the kit. I ran the bass guitar direct, and doubled it with a synth bass.
The piano, which anchors the tune, has a left hand part that doubles the bass at times, so there’s a good big heavy bottom. I layered the paino with two rhodes samples, one with more of an overdrive and the other more of a flange sound. I have a nice sample bank of rhodes presets, and I find doubling them up and adjusting the balance is a lot easier than running a straight piano thru an effects box.
I did a similar trick with the horns. The main tenor sax part is double tracked, and backed up by a synth horn arrangement (I had decided a real horn arrangement was a lot more trouble and not really necessary.) The synth horn is doubled and layered with two rather different sound patches to give a nice blend. I recorded the sax solo on it’s own track, to make it easier to pull it up front in the mix.
The lead vocal track was cut together out of 3 different takes done in rapid succession. I also cut a second vocal track to double it in the verses. In the choruses I’m doing full harmony, which is another 3 tracks worth of vocals. All the backing vocals and saxes (except the sax solo) are on the same effects bus to save CPU power.
So there you have it, enjoy. I have another song I’m ready to start on (a sort of ELP meets Kieth Jarrett number), but it looks like the summer is almost here, and I predict the amount of time I spend in the studio will diminish in the time ahead. Ah well. I’m hoping to do 4 songs this year. We’ll see how it goes.