Songcrafters.org

(Remastered 22/10/2021)

And here's another song from 1994, with a sparkling new "Andrew Russe Band" arrangement fresh from the broom-cupboard.

Like most of my songs, it was written with an acoustic guitar, a pen, and an A4 pad. The ones written like this all have some sort of arrangement in my head, some sort of idea how it's meant to affect you (and me, if I were to perform it on a stage).

And that's all this one had until the other week when I was sifting through the papers in the shoe-box, playing the songs on them to Mrs R. I'd actually forgotten this this song even existed, I'd obviously dismissed it last time I was going through the pile - because it wasn't on my list of "1994 possibles" that I compiled some years ago.

The moment I played it, though, we knew this one just had to be recorded.

The piece of paper has "Lament" written on it, but it's obviously meant to be called The Practical Gardener. That made me wonder about the ending, "life finds a way" and all that... So I tried very very hard to change it and give it a hopeful ending... but it simply did not work like that. This one's a "glass completely bluddy empty" lament, and there's no use tinkering with it...

Powerful piece - very moving and dynamic! Grabbed me and held me with no escape. 8)

Yes, powerful, heart-rending song. Excellent recording. Just my imagination, but I heard Floyd-ish music, and Arthur Brown's voice. Both of which are a good thing.

Love those descending electric piano notes. Love the dynamic shift between quiet, (almost) medieval lament and bombastic, epic rock. Love the drama and delivery of the vocal.

Yes, I can safely say I love it. In fact, it's one of my favourites of yours.

loud and quiet it's got everything, braw bro.

Haunting and powerful.  Love it!

 :) John B

Bloomin heck, this is beyond awesome! This is such a well written and well produced track, it really is the real deal. The dynamics are so well handled, there are great elements of light and shade here. The way you build from just the piano is brilliant, and you still manage different levels of "oomph" between the hue and cry section and the other verses. Some lovely Gilmour-ish guitar and great vocals as always. 

The arrangement and production is what really takes this to another level for me. Not only did you create all the music, but you turned it into a fabulous piece of recorded music. I am in love with your bass sound in particular, it's sooo wonderful when it comes in but it doesn't overpower anything. I like the "old school" production style here - you keep the dynamics without over-compressing anything.

I have some new monitors coming today, can't wait to listen to this one on them......

I have to agree with all that has been said Andy....powerful performance and production indeed!

Farrell

Excellent performance, some lovely guitar work there.
Defo getting a floyd vibe.
Bravo

Oh yes, what a powerful song! Got a bit Floydish vibe, but Portishead flavor on places, as well. The performance and production is just top class. So good songwriting!

Many thanks folks :)

I was wondering who would spot what.

Elsewhere, someone has spotted the Jethro Tull influence. Definitely, at the time this was written, there was lots of exploring Ian Anderson's playing and songwriting, and there is some chord progression similarity by coincidence (see below).

I was also going a bit "medieval" and 16th Century ... Elizabeth's Room and Sleeping with the Ghost were written shortly after this. Actually, if you're interested, I'm collecting the 1994 songs into a playlist, in the order in which they were written, on alonetone Missing Pieces - Songs written in 1994 (https://alonetone.com/andyr/playlists/missing-pieces---songs-written-in-1994). I was quite surprised seeing the progression when I put them in order like this - but you won't get the full effect yet because of the missing songs. 9 are done so far, I'm expecting to record another 5, hopefully this year, but some of them might be rather hard to achieve... (I've been putting them off since I joined songcrafters!)

Btw - you can find all the available ones, individually, if you know what you're looking for, in my jukebox here on songcrafters too, but I'm not aware of a way to link them together like this.

NEways...

It's very interesting folks saying Pink Floyd. YES! But I didn't know until the other day...

When Mrs R and I had heard me play this (just acoustic and vocals in the living room), I explained where I'd taken the chord/bass progression from originally, I'd loved these chords since the early 80s, I'd kept playing them in rehearsals hoping bands would go "let's cover that for a laugh!"... but they never did.

However, I wasn't worried when I nicked the chords for this song in 1994, and I'm even less worried now... I explained how I'd since found similar progressions in Let It Grow (Eric Clapton), We Used To Know (Jethro Tull and therefore Hotel California), etc, etc... and then I went "OH SHIT!!! It's in something else that was possibly a LOT more relevant to me in 1994" ... She went "what?" so I put The Wall on... she had NO IDEA what it was (wha?!?!) until Another brick Part 1 came up later - and then she went "that's a lot like that We don't need no education song... did they copy it?" (::) hehe), but she did kinda hear the chords I was talking about... it's the intro to In The Flesh... that I'd also played a lot but never put 2 and 2 together...

And then I thought - did Pink Floyd nick it off The Damned too?!?!?! LOL  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D (Just checked... I don't think so, they were both recorded in 1979, and released November 1979).

Anyway, listening to The Wall (still my favourite album for when I'm down and need cheering up!) probably had some affect on how I decided to arrange this.

This one's middle 8 was "broken", I couldn't remember how to play the chords rhythmically (songs from back then are handwritten with the chords written in pencil) ... I do remember it was VERY Jethro Tull and involved a change of rhythm/tempo. Also I didn't like a lot of the words of the middle 8 - it was all a bit fey. So I distilled what was there down to what we have here, the "hue and cry" ... "still today" section. The chord progression is roughly the same, and "The hue and cry was heard for miles" has kept its original tune but otherwise, it's just keeping the original spirit of the thing: opening lament, frantic interlude telling us what it was like when "the thief got away", and then the closing lament.

Once the recording started getting big on me, that's when the guitar solo stuff occurred, and yeah, I guess we were already locked into "Dave Gilmour" territory. I wasn't thinking that at the time, I was just worried about how to get through it, how to fill the thing with noise rising to an abrupt dead stop, with the vocalist somehow making sense at the same time. But listening now, yeah.

The bass... haha... it's the guide bass. It was done with the same "fuzztone" bank on my basspod as Me Too was. It seemed almost good enough, but it did cause problems during mixing in the closing lament because when I originally played it I thought we were going to get frantic again... (the guitar solo was to be another section at the end, massive fade out thing, but we decided it was better to end "oh well, I'll slit my wrists then, or not... woteva"). So there's some "interesting" picking on the bass that I had to hide.

The bass was played with a plectrum, that always seems to add a little something. And it is strongly backed up with some bottom end keyboards - both the electric piano and, in the middle section and closing lament, a big throaty organ. Those are probably giving most of the "body" of the bass part, leaving the bass free to give us the attack and grindy bit (which I had to disguise in the closing section).

Mixing and production, this thing went through a LOT of experiments. I now know how to use a limiter effectively before/during mixing. And various other tricks, all aimed at removing ALL transients from everything before mixing. This new knowledge got used again on When I try To Be Me, which was recorded afterwards, and I had to remix that several times to calm it down!

I sat on the mastered mix for The Practical Gardener for a week or two because it just didn't feel quite as mind-blowing as we thought it did at first. Then, one afternoon, waiting for her to come home, I ended up doing what a modern day mastering engineer apparently invariably has to do nowadays - put some life back into it with the volume control (because the mix itself is already loud and fat when he/she gets it, and some of the dynamics might have gone or not be as striking as they could have been).

I did it in audacity on a copy of the final mastered version, just cutting and boosting volume. I added the fade in, roughly matched the intro guitar at the end of it to the acoustics in the backing, made sure the opening chord/vocal was MUCH BIGGER but tailing away quickly so I could get the crescendo through to the end of the first lament. That all worked so well, I did similar to the closing lament (that actually involved lowering stuff). Then I then lowered the links a bit, and finally I went into the middle section putting mini crescendos up to the peaks I wanted... I had played/planned it all like that, but I was a bit conservative when mixing, so they weren't as pronounced as they could have been. I realised that this one actually wants that.

Finally, having saved it, I hard limited the whole mix and re-amplified it to zero. Because all the transients in the submixes had been cleaned before the main mix, this meant this last limit didn't really lose me any parts or make it sound squashed like it does usually... instead, all it did was remove the transients caused in the mix and enhanced by my original mastering (eg vocal has some energy but not a spike, but combined with a guitar mix, equally clean of spikes, suddenly there's a massive transient spike when the two are mixed). The effect was a) the track finally got up to the volume I wanted, b) sounding much bigger, and c) suddenly I could hear all the guitars and vocal in the middle section, separated as intended... bonus!

When Mrs R got home, I played the original to her and then this. She was flabbergasted at what artistic effect musical use of the volume control can have...

Blimey, you should write a book on writing, recording and producing music..... ;) Seriously, could you pm me some of the lessons you learned about limiting if you get time?

I just listened again on my new monitors. They're not fully burned in yet but it sounds even better than last time!

Quote from: Ferryman on August 12, 2020, 09:38:16 AMBlimey, you should write a book on writing, recording and producing music..... ;) Seriously, could you pm me some of the lessons you learned about limiting if you get time?

I just listened again on my new monitors. They're not fully burned in yet but it sounds even better than last time!

The quickest way is to share where I got them from... :) :) :)

Have you come across this guy on youtube?

Produce Like a Pro (https://www.youtube.com/c/Producelikeapro/featured)

His name's Warren Huart. He's an English musician/producer based in LA.

I subscribed several years ago because he had an in-depth demo/review of the Yamaha THR100-HD amp (which is what I use, don't remember whether I already owned it by then - but he would have sold it to me!).

He's really enthusiastic and keen that anyone can learn. I fancy he might rub some folks up the wrong way, but I quite like his delivery/personality - he's sat in his own studio, it feels like he'd make sure you had a cup of tea etc etc and would let you fiddle with the knobs and faders on his kit.


Anyway, didn't watch him too often back then - he generates too much content for me to keep up with!

Then a few weeks back, he posted this:
How to get LOUD MIXES! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fCCzaWyGvQ)
... just when I wanted to know :)

From there, I wanted to know "what on earth is parallel compression?"
And he posted this a few days later:
Secret Digital Mixing Trick for Analog Sound - Parallel Compression (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3po6BF_SQ8&t=1052s)
(having cleaned the unwanted transients, you're highlighting the performance's transients and bringing them back in using a copy of the track and heavy compression - a technique I sometimes use on vocals is a variation on this... it's also called New York Compression... but this guy demos it and actually makes it happen in front of you).

I had to translate his DAW work to the BR1600 (although, he's almost convinced me to switch, and it would be much quicker that way), but flip!! Much of this was used on Practical Gardener... Mrs R had said "you're putting loads more effort into this one, is it special?" so I showed her the videos and explained what the techniques were - she started getting interested too.
For example, I've been terrified of over compressing or limiting the lead vocal... no more! That's the first thing I do once I've got the take. Then I can add parallel compression to bring out the juicy bits.

I'm not going to do this, but I am tempted to go back to Edith Finally Gets It and remix... that could get seriously WOAH!! if you did this to it.

I've spotted other videos I need to watch:
How to clean up a Muddy Mix
8 Tips for Amazing Low End

Sounds like the sort of thing a chap needs to know, eh?

Check out the descriptions in the videos - he describes everything, links everything.

Just noticed, he also has an "academy" you can join via his own website.

Boom - Absolutely.

Holy mackerel, that is one dynamic song! Really enjoyed that (the bass sounds ginormous). I intend to subscribe to Produce Like a Pro - many thanks for sharing the link.

Well I listened at work on my crappy computer speakers and thought it was good so tonight I put it on the studio monitors and wow what a production needed better speakers to catch all the parts
Bravo
Tim

Thanks Andy, I have watched a few of the Warren Huart videos so will definitely check out more.

Keep up the good work in the cupboard!

Just WOW!! ????

Excellent song Andy, it really blows the doors off in places and along with those brooding quieter parts this is really pretty proggy stuff. Well worth investigating... and I dig that lead playing.

Mike

I was just rereading this, and I realised I never said which song by The Damned I was referencing!

It was "I Just Can't Be Happy Today". Not the riff, but the chords under the title hook:

Em, B/F#, G, A9

It's what the medieval lament part of this is written over.

I love that chord progression. In fact, I've probably used it in all sorts of places in various keys over the years, as I've discovered many others have...

But I first heard it in the hands of The Damned.
I hated punk originally, still don't hold it in any reverence at all.
But The Damned, WHAT a band. (They're prog-rockers really LOL ;D ;D ;D)

Wow!
This is great Andy.  Total pro track. Everything about it, the recording,  vocals, playing- killer.

Looking at it say from a person who doesn't record music, ( I  try to imagine how my wife hears it).. you would say, "what album is this on"?
Yea, rambling here because the thoughts are not coming to me at this early hour, but I'm  feeling the power and emotion.  You know your "stuff"!
Terrific track.

Wow great stuff, pro quality writing,  musicianship  and recording. Apart from all that, it's very distinctive, just a great listen!

as somebody mentioned , very pink floyed , great gritty vocals , sounds superb . worth another listen fantastic work andy .  cheers tony cee

WOW  very powerful music and story ,with killer guitar and vocals , played through my system it sounds truly inspiring to say least , very professional recording , and i just love when the guitar comes in with the vocals on top as well , you are a talented songster and muso Andy , Loved it Brilliant

Dunny

Another stunner Andy.

Yes - I definitely get the hints of Floyd and Anderson - but just to throw another one in there - perhaps a hint of Muse?  But stunningly you of course.

Brilliant.

Paul

Quote from: chapperz66 on August 22, 2020, 06:08:30 AMAnother stunner Andy.

Yes - I definitely get the hints of Floyd and Anderson - but just to throw another one in there - perhaps a hint of Muse?  But stunningly you of course.

Brilliant.

Paul

I was commenting on Frank53's Long Shadows, suggesting I get a Procol Harum vibe, and then I remembered how I laughed when I saw this comment Paul!!

I know of Muse. I think my niece, now in her 30s, is/was into them. And once, on a car journey, we (me and Mrs R) had them played to us by my sister cos she happened to have her daughter's CDs in the car (but she proceeded to talk over it so I couldn't really concentrate!)

But I have no real idea what Muse is like or what they do. All I have at the moment is that I know they're something I would probably like if I started looking into them, and they're "on the list" for one day...

Damn! I mean it brother, Damn!
Rock on!

Great work, Andy. This is an epic rock experience with stellar production techniques in play. The whole arrangement of the song with the light and shade passages is excellent too and a great vocal performance is the icing on the cake.

Just love this. The dynamics are incredible and so effective. The guitar solo is off the scale -  love it.

Andy ( funkyaxe )

Been about a year since this one came out and just before I joined SC

When i first heard this I wasn't that crazy about it....but I have learned that many times those are the ones I will end up liking the most...I downloaded this and added it to my SC thumbdrive that I listen to often driving in the car...sometimes on trips for hours at a time...
I heard this again today and the more I hear it the more I like it...it's a massive track and to think the whole thing was recorded and mixed on the BR1600....that is impressive work Andy...this is a bit like a lost PF track.. it's just that big and that good...
admittedly I don't get to listen to alot of Andy's work because most of is linked to a site I cannot get on at work and that is where I listen to alot of music...

wow brilliant song andy , i hear shades of dave bowie in your voice , superb lyrics glad you found this one out great listen ...cheers tony cee

This is brilliant....I am so glad this got bumped back...thanks to SteveM....good stuff......so superb...its my favorite AndyR song suddenly....a solo like that could feed a whole villiage...outstanding

Second time I had to post this comment, let's hope it doesn't crash again :)

Flipping heck, this one really soars. So much contrast between the electric piano/acoustic parts and the full, open sounding verses. Everything's arranged and mixed perfectly, I'm especially in love with those backing harmonies in the mix (to die for!). Lovely song and a stunning vocal performance Andy.

oh my ......


this is just too good

we're not worthy !!!

Aww cheers folks :)

I hadn't realised this one had done some more business - I must use the "New replies to your posts" more often.

That's cheered me up considerably. I'm struggling with the last bit of my first thing from the Studio One DAW.

The Practical Gardener IS one of my favourite productions. I've always loved the verse chords and the imagery, and what it grew into when I recorded it was quite an eye-opener... it made me realise that nearly all of my favourite but flawed acoustic ditties from the last XX years could perhaps have more legs than I thought, and would be too difficult to do.

There's something interesting here, though, Practical Gardener is one of the things I've been referring back to while working in the DAW. My mindset is "I should AT LEAST be able to match this from the BR1600" ... I know, I'm crazy!

Actually, a lot of the final production that makes this recording of The Practical Gardener so dramatic and sparkle like this didn't happen on the BR1600, I did a whole bunch of "post-mastering mastering" in Audacity.

BUT I discovered over the weekend that I was using an Audio Driver set to 48.0K to work on source material at 44.1K and render wav/mp3 at 44.1K to do this... And I was doing it on my living room hifi not in the studio!

That's not enough for me to go back and redo it, although I've just discovered I've still got the wav files that came off the BR1600 for this song, I Give In, and Silver Pillow, which were treated in the same way (in fact, the acoustic ones before that were the first time I did such a thing, the audio needed editing and the addition of volume changes improved the masters, and...)

Anyway, it doesn't completely f**k it up at all... but I've got bigger ears now, and I can hear now how you're all slightly in the "cheap-seats" with this version.

I've got three wav versions of The Practical Gardener:

• What came off the BR1600 - mastered on there. I came close to publishing that but, on my hifi it didn't sound as dramatic as I was hoping, and I knew it had more in there. The mp3 exported was particularly "lacklustre" (which I now believe to have been caused, at least in part, by the sample rate mismatch, I might try that again in a minute now I've fixed the mismatch).
• Adding the dynamics I felt were needed was going to be an utter pig on the BR. Seeing as it was all volume changes on the stereo mix, I decided to do it in Audacity. So this wav has the fade in you can hear on the published version. It has the tiny fades before the big entries so they sound even bigger. It has... blah, blah, I can't remember it all... There are some tricky little volume changes in the big middle section that were surprisingly effective... BUT this version is also COMPROMISED - in the same way Mrs R and I witnessed the other night on a new one - it lacks some of the flavour to the sound that the BR1600 file has. Part of it is "breath" on the vox, and over all clarity and warmth. And this is all, I believe, down to me using Audacity to render the audio changes using a driver running at a different sample rate. It seems to be playback is fine, but writing new audio (basically converting 48.0 to 44.1 on the fly) is not so groovy.
• The third version is what I exported from Audacity as mp3 and published. This has more limiting applied to Version2. I wondered whether it could take it, and it could. It's louder, and it had an acceptable level of "has this been limited?" But it's got the compromised vibe inherited from version 2...

What I might do is bring the original BR wav into Studio One's mastering suite - the volume edits would be easier to achieve than in Audacity (and infinitely easier to achieve than on the BR1600). But that's a lot of work that could be better spent on the new one.

However, the problem I'm having with the new one is lack of volume. I'm learning stuff right now, in mixing, stuff that I was doing by accident in the BR1600 because I was restricted in what I could do. That will give me more loudness and clarity than I have right at the moment, enough loudness to compete ok with other posters on alonetone. But the new one will still suffer from being followed on my playlist by Silver Pillow, I Give In, and then this. I might actually have to go back to Audacity and, reduce the volume by 2-3db on those and then update their versions on alonetone (I'm more tempted now that I've found I have the versions prior to the final limiting stages)

If that is what I have to do, I will be also be tempted to go through Studio One instead of Audacity.
But doing that will commit me to having to redo the volume edits in The Practical Gardener (I can't take the edited version, it's already compromised). So, who knows...

Anyways... many thanks :)