Great Expectations by Oldrottenhead

[Oldrottenhead]

This one came about completely by accident and by a method i have never tried before. I was trying to come up with something i could use for a collaboration with a good friend (need to be the next one mucker) but got sucked into this one. I was messing about with some synths and drums on Garageband on my MacBook and nothing was happening. So i dropped the drums and then things got pretty strange, i let the synths just run and i had my Jasmine acoustic at hand and worked out a riff to go with the weirdness, but when i came to record i used my HB tele. I then added some bass. transferred it all to my MicroBR and warbled over the top.

Anyway
It is what it is.

Great expectations have been placed on you
Have we set you up to fail well I hope that isn't true
Turn over the page and make this story
Turn over the page and make this story

You've sure have not been dealt the best of hands
But you can throw those cards away and start again
Turn over the page and make this story
Turn over the page and make this story

You can do whatever you want to do
Don't you know it's entirely up to you

Great expectations have been placed on you
Have we set you up to fail well I hope that isn't true
Turn over the page and make this story
Turn over the page and make this story
Make this story yours

Great Expectations

W/M
by
Oldrottenhead

[alfstone]

And this one is really SUPER, James!

Alfredo

[Flash Harry]

I've just been out-synth'd


Lovely sounds, lovely vocal, nice arrangement - I assume that's a virtual upright bass?

fab

[Redler]

Sometimes it is good to do things on different way! This sounds to something new and fresh. Bravo James!

[Ferryman]

This is really interesting. I was blown away by the lyrics, I really like what you did with those. Superb.

The music provides a great open platform for the lyrics. It came together in a weird way but it sounds very atmospheric and the Tele sounds great.

Great vocal performance as always creates a very beguiling listen. I've had this looping for a while and it's fab. Nice one Jim. 

[AndyR]

Wowowwow - it is what it is

... and that's utterly FAB

I see what you've done, I understand how you did it, I even recognise some of those creative steps... but I just couldn't manage the bit that lets you go "hey that works, I'll go with it like that".

Maybe I'm too rooted in my basic "song and arrangement in my head before recording" approach. But even when I use the recording machine during the songwriting, and I use some of the techniques you describe (I'm doing it right now, the machine is next to the keyboard I'm typing on, the song started as a "Robin Trower" guitar riff last weekend, I caught it on the machine, sang some stuff, copied and pasted more sections, inserted chunks, wrote the final lyrics, cried about it. Then I switched to recording "She's Dead" from scratch, sorted that out. Then after work each day I cam back to this band thing, practised different parts, wrote new hooks, switched across different instruments, etc, etc, just jamming along, recording some if it was cute, new, and I didn't want to forget it... and now its's "enough of that" - I think I know what needs playing "for real" throughout ... and I'm getting up the energy to do the bass part. In this thing I'm actually making some arrangement decisions/choices I wouldn't usually contemplate, I'm quite excited to see what happens, but I still have to play it all again, none of the parts are keepers - they have mistakes in or don't have the right tonality for what's in my head, or too many notes, or whatever... at least the bluddy drums are finished, though!!! )

... even when I take that sort of approach, which I'm guessing you recognise some or most of, I'm still rooted in the "how would the Andrew Russe Band play it?".

I'm taking a break, listening to Great Expectations on repeat... as a creator, not as listener... and I'm thinking, if this had been mine, I'd be thinking "it's not finished"... each time it goes round I hear some new bit that I'd want to fix if I'd played it, because I wouldn't be able to see the arrangement "pattern" or "template" that it "properly" fits into... basically, I'd think it was distracting from the song, that's my one rule of thumb, everything I do on recording/arranging comes down to: "does it help the song", I apply it to everything (including my vocal! when I was in a band, the other dudes didn't seem to grasp that I applied the same "but it don't bluddy fit the song!!!!" to my vocal...) anyways...

But when I switch back to "listener" mode on this, none of it matters... it's complete, nothing distracts or subtracts, it all adds, the whole is perfect and there's nothing I want changed... Don't bother wrapping it, I'll take it now...

Somehow you always manage to stick a song onto something in such a way that means it takes no sh!t from the backing band LOL
And you do it with out damaging the backing band!

Woah... I don't know how you do it... AWE 

EDIT: I see Ferryman's been doing the same as me

[Oldrottenhead]

thank you guys,

yes flash I used a virtual bass as you know my real bass is toasted.

Andy the synth thing is very deliberate in that its simple but random and predictable but unpredictable if that makes sense. however I spent more time on that than anything else. I must have tried a hundred different synth sounds, there are two synths playing same notes but getting the pairing right was really difficult to create the effect I had. I pretty much had that effect at first go but tried different synths then couldn't remember the one's I liked in the first place. ouch! anyway it then resulted in a deeply personal work related lyric surfacing up from somewhere. and yes.      it is what it is.

[AndyR]

Hehehe... I know that "hey! that's a cool effect... now let's do it properly... er... where's it gone?!!?!?!" thing

I love the lyric. Over the last years/months I've learnt not to dig too deep into what the lyricist might have intended - because there's a lot of stuff going on that people want to write about that I don't necessarily agree with what they want to say! LOL

These just kinda touched me... they mean something to me, they say something for me... might be along the same lines as what you were saying for yourself, might not be, but it doesn't matter... what does matter is that they said SOMETHING, caused an emotion, some thought...

(have you ever heard my theory on a song isn't finished until it's in the listener's head? So we shouldn't get too stressed if someone thinks our songs are about something we didn't even think of? Anyways, I used to get so upset about this when I was younger... and then one day I watched a somewhat older Ian Anderson in Jethro Tull complain on stage that people got his song about suicide wrong, thinking it was happy and uplifting!! It was, VERY happy and uplifting!! ... that suddenly made me see the light about my own stuff...)


How's the bass toasted? Is there a thread somewhere?

This virtual thing sounds very cool anyways.

[Oldrottenhead]

My lyrics are always open to interpretation and often i try to keep them vague so the listener can make their own interpretation. I know what this one is about, however it is often the case that i am wrong about that too, a year down the line a song can mean something completely different to me or i go AHA! that was......... etc etc.

The bass is a virtual upright bass that comes pre plugged in with garageband, i played that and the synths through a korg nanokey.

[Greeny]

Sublime. Ethereal yet insistent. Amazing how good the absence of drums can sound on the right song. And what a fantastic mix.