Here’s a rough mix of Sandcastle Kingdoms, the second song for my forthcoming album Spellbound. I don’t really remember too much about writing this one. It’s mainly one of “mine” with me sings lead vocals and having a keyboard part as the spine of the track. I guess I was feeling restless and forlorn at the time, and tapping into that for the lyric.
Musically, it’s pretty much a power ballad, with a repeated 8-bar verse and a bridge. I was aiming for some level of terraced dynamics, building up layers of parts throughout the song. And there’s alot of parts. In addition to the piano bass and drum, there’s a string/brass synthesizer and the guitar. Of course the piano is double-tracked with a Fender Rhodes and the Juno’s Polysynth 1 patch. The drums are midi and samples for now, but I’ll put down real drums later one.
The lead vocals are drenched in effects, although I’ll probably dial that back later. This song was really high in my range and has some really long sustained high notes. It took me a few takes to really nail it. If I were writing this song now I’d probably shift it down to an easier key. But once I found my voice up there it sounded really good, so I kept it.
The synth part is a blend of four patches, two each of synth strings and synth brass, and one of each of those being an onboard sound of my protools rig and the other one from the outboard Juno, being the sounds used on the original recording. I was going for something nice and rich and fat. I still need to go in and add some fader moves to make the brass predominate in the louder sections and the strings in the more delicate parts.
This is the first song where I tried to replicate Martin’s guitar part. Martin didn’t sing on this track and the guitar seemed to be his only contribution. Martin’s sound – the phrasing and the tone – always had a certain magic to it, even from these early recordings. I’ve been listening really close and trying to capture that, but ultimately found it’s elusive and I’m having to make it my own. I’m using a whole different setup, different guitar, amp and effects that sounds like me. But I’m learning alot about how use effects to get different kinds of guitar sounds.
In any event, I copped his solo fairly faithfully because it fit so perfectly in the song. I also paraphrased his riffs in the intro and outro. I even added some new riffs on the the bridge. All this is on a lead guitar track. On the original track Martin also did a bit of noodling around in the verse, but I didn’t duplicate that. Instead I added a second guitar track, low and overdriven with alot of sustain, deep in the background to give the track some fullness and weight. This is the kind of thing Martin used to call “guitariness”. Getting the right sound for this was a learning experiment too, and I’m not finished yet.
So here you go, enjoy!
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/Sandcastles27.mp3