Songcrafters.org

Another acoustic one from the vaults (21st December 1993).

Recorded 10-12 April 2010 on a BR1600.

Another good one Andy.  Love the key changes which build on the drama brilliantly - and great clarity on the acoustic guitars.  I'm guessing that you used mics rather than DIing - what mics do you use?

A bit Uriah Heep in feel, I thought.  (Hope you aren't offended by comparisons with other artists.  Someone once got all indignant with me when I said - in genuine praise - that they reminded me of someone else.  If anybody wants to tell me I sound like Joe Satriani I promise I won't be offended at all!)

Paul

I too hear a bit of Uriah Heep and a touch of Tom Jones vox.
This is a great song. Destined to be a favorite of mine!

LG

I loved it from the opening guitar. Dramatic vocals, great lyrics, faultless production, and another absolutely top quality offering. The acoutsic guitar sounds so 'live'. Brilliant!!!!!!

Thats the way to record acoustic guitar.  Please good sir, how did you record this guitar, all the gory details please.  Great song, really great song.  I am laughing at the Tom Jones vocal comment from our esteemed colleague LG, thats a good one.  I don't quite hear your vocals in that light, they are certainly dramatic and moving, thats for sure.  You want my comparision, seeing as the mind seeks out patterns and connections, I hear Wishbone Ash (Argus era), that is what I think.  Holy man that is sonme ending, snappy, poppy guitar.  You are a deadly guitarist.

This is another wonderful song Andy! You sure have the grip on the soncrafting !! Dramatic song with a great melody, the modulations, the powerful voice,  the fantastic production the excellent performance. .... ....  this one got it all !!

Is that a fake acoustic bass again? It sounds great !

And I love the acoustic sound here.

Some quick secrets:

The "Double-Bass" is a Variax bass Guitar, which has a Double-bass model. Half the trick seems to be in figuring out how to play it like a double bass!!

It's got quite a bit of chorus on it, and a fair bit of compression. I was trying to get it to sound "natural", but to do that in the track (and pin down the bottom end at the same time) meant making it less natural... go figure :D

I want to use it again on the next one - I'm looking at something that has this acoustic, a resonator, (one part each, not layers), a dble-bass and drums, and a telecaster... Not sure yet...

The acoustics... yep, it's my new Godin "5th Avenue" archtop. Fantastic recording guitar, especially for those lead and harmony lines. I can't always play like that guys! For some reason this one just snaps and glides, even for an acoustic. However, I probably should have used a flat-top for the main rhythm parts, I was struggling to get that "big old strummy" sound for those.

All guitars and vocals were recorded with a Rodes (NT1000, I think) condenser mic. However, on the last one (Sleeping With The Ghost), some stuff was done with a rusty old SM58 as well - and to be honest, there's not a lot of difference, there's a bit more clarity I guess... For guitars, I'd be quite happy if I only had the SM58 (I'd use the condensor out of choice though), for the resonator I'll probably have to use the SM58, for vocals, I'd use the SM58 for a rock voice - that seems to get me there faster...

And actually, for this vocal, the SM58 was set up as a dummy mic for me to sing into - this enables me to put the condensor off to one side (one side of your mouth, the left in my case, produces more sibilants, so I put the mic on the right). If I don't use a dummy mic, I find myself following the other mic and singing into it, defeating the whole plan...

Uriah Heep... never really looked into them much, but I assume you mean the earlier stuff - I think I hear what you mean.

Tom Jones - class! :D
He is one of my favourite singers... I wasn't thinking Tom Jones when I was singing, but I think I know what you mean - I'll have to listen again when I get home.

Wishbone Ash - I am a bit fond of them, and yeah, I guess the guitar overdubs went that way... but the bare solo version isn't like them at all!

Actually, the song was ready Sunday, but I just couldn't get a mix going. One of the reasons was because it didn't have the punch and aggression, and sense of theatre, that you'd get if you sat in the room with me playing and singing it to you on one guitar.

I realised there were too many guitars smoothing things out. So I ditched a couple and backed off the reverbs on several of them. Then on the others I did "complementary" eq-ing - I took chunks of mids, but different frequencies, out of different guitars. This seemed to make it work better. One sub-mix even had a cut of -24dB on its mids!

Pretty much I got the layers of guitars and hardly audible percussion just about right, and then treated the vocal, bass, and main lead as solo instruments. I knew the main lead worked "as is" with some compression and lots of a nice dark "Room" reverb. So I played the vocal and bass against each other until they seemed to enjoy being together and then brought the guitars up to meet them.

I nearly redid the vocal - I couldn't hear the performance that I thought I'd captured on Saturday. But then last night, after a lot of eq fiddling (and compression) on this take, it suddenly jumped out at me... so I thought sod it, this is it. I got up early and mastered the last mix and posted it before going to work...

That involved taking a decision to omit backing vocals. I think this could go up a gear with backing vocals, but I think it lives without them. BVs would take quite a while to work out for this one, and might mean rethinking the guitars and bass again, so decided to go without and move on to the next thing... I might come back to it later when I've got some time.

Intense Andy, very very intense (the production). The song is fantastic. I'm amazed by your quality on each post, though I should be accustomed to it by now.

This is a piepodder for sure.

Andy, it's pretty rare for me to do multiple listens to songs - but I've played this 4 or 5 times today.  Like it more each time.

Paul

Wonderful. Your archtop sounds great. I really admire the narrative style you have in songs like this one and Sleeping with the Ghost.  It's very literary, and does not come easily to me at all.

 Fantastic song!!!! Your lead licks remind me of Mark Knopfler!!
Awesome vox!!! There are many great songs on this site but, this one and Sleeping with the ghost are in a class all their own at the top of the list!!!!! And that is saying a lot!!!!!

Gary

I've got another secret - I was a bit disappointed with this recording after Sleeping With The Ghost :D

I am actually VERY fond of The Knife, but for different reasons. It's always been one of my favourites, but I know from back in the 90s that it seems to divide people. Some absolutely love the story, same as I do, it's got this black humour to it... others seem put off by that side of it.

So I was a bit disappointed that it didn't come out as roundedly "wonderful" as SWTG did. I was stuck working on this, listened to SWTG again, and nearly binned this one as a "try again one day"

But I realised, while I was struggling with the mix, that it's just not as "good" a song as SWTG - "good" as in all-round and wide appeal. That's all it is, SWTG almost recorded itself - once you know how to sing it, it's not that difficult to get it sounding good.

Some songs take an awful lot to mess up, others you have to work hard to get a "performance" out of them.

So I realised that with this one I had to change the approach to try and bring out some of the resigned grit and black humour - that's what this song has for as appeal, at least for me, anyway. I proceeded to add some crisper guitar parts and spent several hours hitting things to produce a percussion track.

All in all, it got closer, and then last night, hacking into the EQs, it got even closer. I still wasn't 100%, but I decided to post - kind of "hang it out there" and see what people thinks...

So I'm very encouraged by the comments so far - thanks folks! It kind of helps me for future recordings :)

Ted, I like that style too - I seemed to use it an awful lot in the early 90s, which is why I'm plundering the box of songs for recordings. But then it seems to have deserted me when I was in my next band in the late 90s... divorce might have had soemthing to do with it...

Anyway I've not been able to find out exactly how I did it back then (as in, I've not been able to repeat it since starting to make music again in the last few years!)

Oh, finally, no one else has mentioned them in this thread yet... this is from my Jethro Tull phase, perhaps that's where the narrative style comes from.... Mebbe I ought to get them Tull CDs out again!

Wow great song ~ luv it!!  Fantastic guitar and key changes, which really adds some cool buildup & intense vibes!  There's something subliminal that says "play me again" ;~)

Quote from: Satchwood on April 13, 2010, 01:08:10 PMWow great song ~ luv it!!  Fantastic guitar and key changes, which really adds some cool buildup & intense vibes!  There's something subliminal that says "play me again" ;~)

That just reminds me of something else I did with this one. I knew it had to "build", and it needed to breath a bit on the tempo front. But after the problems I had with SWTG and no click, and I knew these verses had to be quite "tight", I knew I had to use a click...

So I bit the bullet and learnt how to do a tempo map. It goes up 1 beat per minute at the start of every verse, and halfway through every verse. And then it slows down every bar or two on the last reprise... So the intro and outro are the same speed, I think, but different keys (because it goes up a semi-tone each verse).

I'm sure I'll have folks disagree, but I actually hear Bruce Dickinson (from Iron Maiden and not the "More Cowbell" skit). The delivery is especially similar in the phrasing of "plunged it in her breast" part or something to that effect.

Great tune and great production.

Blooby

:D I was actually listening to Live After Death when I was doing the ironing before I started this recording... oops!

(also it's the one bit of the vocal where the timing isn't quite right... it might be the vocal, or it might be the bass, I did the vocal without the bass, but it's the vocal that sounds rushed to me)

Andy, this is another superb piece of songwriting, playing and production. Your vocal performance is fantastic, the guitar playing is top notch and the arrangement and structure of the song is great, nice little key change and superb guitar parts.

I really like the narrative structure here (and also in SWTG). You have a prog rock style here (in the storytelling) coupled with a more modern musical style and I really like that. I suspect that as you are a similar age to me that prog rock from the 70s has wormed its way inside you and reveals itself in the way you approach some of your music. I like that a lot, and I certainly got some Jethro Tull from this alhough I couldn't really categorize the musical style.

The production sounds great to me, those glitches you are hearing aren't noticeable to me. I know what you mean about this compared to SWTG. That just oozes awesomeness, and there is such subtlety and depth in your vocal treatments on that song it would be hard to match with anything else (perhaps that was why you left the backing vox out?). Also, this is a very similar style of song so it's hard not to compare them. This is an excellent song but SWTG is quite special. I think if you had done something else in between you wouldn't have felt the same way, but coming to The Knife from SWTG, and having one go so well while the other was a struggle, is going to make you compare them (perhaps unfavourably).

I think these are both great examples of a particular musical style of yours and would sound great together on an album. They are both really strong pieces of work in their own right. Magnificent stuff, and thanks for more production notes on the SWTG thread.

Cheers,

Nigel

Freaking Amazing Andy!!!!!


This is a song that will go on the mp3 player....

And a thread that I am Gonna study...

Thanks for printing your Production Tips!
They are amazing!!!

Thanks guys :)

After posting last night, I listened to this back-to-back with SWTG and, um... soundwise, this one is better! Phew, that's a relief... some sort of improvement then!... :D (my wife says "different" but, like you, she hasn't heard what the parts of SWTG actually sound like underneath)

I might actually follow my own production tips.

What it does mean is that I could seriously improve the sound of SWTG by remixing it using the same techniques I used here (and getting the vocal processing, er, actually right!!) - the basic tracks are all the same quality and voicing as on this one. The difference is in the EQ-ing and compression of sub-mixes during mixing and then the mastering choices I had to make because of the vocals...

It's a lot of work... but I is tempted :D

I am getting ideas for writing though, so maybe that's where I'll put my energy instead...
... and there are, er, several more (um, double-figures, actually) of these songs from this early 90s period that would hold their own against these two... some would be harder to record, some easier... especially with what I've learnt in the last week.

Quality all the way from start to finish, great song with production of the highest order.

Quote from: AndyR on April 14, 2010, 11:32:17 AMIt's a lot of work... but I is tempted :D

I am getting ideas for writing though, so maybe that's where I'll put my energy instead...
... and there are, er, several more (um, double-figures, actually) of these songs from this early 90s period that would hold their own against these two... some would be harder to record, some easier... especially with what I've learnt in the last week.

Step away from the desk...... I would focus on doing the new stuff. You know that certain things can be improved but only you know that. I listened to SWGT earlier today on reasonable quality headphones (OK only a PC soundcard though) and I thought it sounded great, there was an ethereal feel to the vocal treatments. We've all been impressed here, take that as positive feedback. I would do a few more in a similar vein, then re-listen to SWTG and if you feel it needs redoing, then go for it. But you may find it sits ok as a "different" sounding track in the larger body of work.

I know there are always things that I can imporve in my tracks but sometimes you just have to say it's good enough as it is, warts and all. Think of the first Motorhead album - sounds like it was recorded underwater through an old sock but it has a charm all of its own......

Cheers,

Nigel

TOTALLY AGREE with all the above espedally the Uriah Heep
influence in here. this song is a great song in itself. withgreat
possibilites for a movie or tv backdrop. wonder ful work tc Neil

Please listen and critiqe my latest post
I JUST WANT TO DANCE WITH YOU. A
great love song. you will enjoy.thanks NS

Cheers for that Ferryman -I was reaching that same conclusion overnight.

Will-do SwanSong. If only they'd let me stream audio at work :D. I'm hoping to get some time to do some catching up on my listening tonight. I've had a quick listen to a couple of yours over the last week or so and I like what you're doing :)

Great song Andy. I love the tone of the acoustic guitars, great lead lines on the acoustic. Great chord progression and the key change really builds the dramatic tension of the lyrics. Vocals are wonderful and lyrics are outstanding. Amazing tune, nice job on the mix.

excellent andy, playing catch up with about four pages of unread posts, glad i caught this one. gonna delete all unread and hope i dont miss too much.

This sounds so good, Andy!!! A real fine song with the excellent production and performance!

Kari

wow!!! I am in awe. I was transported to some English coast line...black and white...wind whipping her hair..the struggle...the knife. I LOVE your voice, reminds me of some of my favorite hairband gods. And the guitar work just sent me...I know, I'm gushing praise, can't help myself...

This is my last "moving mp3s to alonetone" self-bump in Originals for now.

It was interesting listening to this again and reading the comments and what I'd said.

At the time, I was a little disappointed with how this came out (and also how it made me look at Sleeping With The Ghost) - but listening to it now... I can't hear what I was worried about ::)

I suspect there's a lesson to be learnt in there somewhere!!  :D

This remains my fave of your stuff Andy.

Paul

guitar playing wise I don't remember hearing anything you've done that comes even close to this (please see this as a compliment, you are very good but this one is another notch upupupup)!!!

It's hard to get past that to the vocals and lyrics for me... but they are also super..it's just a fantastic song...
OTD bump