Sleeping With The Ghost - AndyR Original

[Gary F]

 Hauntingly beautiful!!!! Awesome vox!!!
 A wonderful performance!!!!

 Gary

[Ferryman_1957]

Fantastic stuff Andy, great production and singing but the acoustic playing blew me away. A very clever song with some great twists and turns and as everyone else said, the quality of the recording is absolutely top notch. Any new production tricks you're going to share here? I always learn so much from your detailed posts (which I cut and paste into an Andy recording manual btw....).

Cheers,

Nigel

[hooper]

Wow!.... Really great sounds here, both the quality of the individual parts and the mix.  It's evident that you work carefully but also this one is off the scale for creativity and originality. This production exudes quality.  Mighty fine job!

[Satchwood]

Very creative ~ great singing and music composition!!  Sounds very theatrical and would be perfect for a dramatic performance in a musical!

[SE]

Just pro work, with great songwriting, can,t get any better, thanks for sharing.

[Bluesberry]

Full of beauty, wonderful playing and singing.  Harmonies are superb. 

[Blooby]

I have come back to this one several times.  Stunning production but the song still takes center-stage.  Love how the instrumentation comes in slowly.

Blooby

[AndyR]

Aha! We've reached page 2... (self-bumping etiquette and all that )

Thanks folks - much appreciated

It came out a lot better than I was expecting, the song that is... It's from quite a large batch of songs I wrote in the mid 90s. Most of them were written for solo performance, with a possible eye on a band I was leading. I'm not sure the band ever heard this one - it just seemed a little too whimsical for them

Having said that, I did re-use the little instrumental bit in the middle in a later song, and we rehearsed that - it sounded very good with a two guitar rock band (once they got their heads round it) - very Jethro Tull in a Free and The Faces kind of way.

I have always been rather fond of this one, it's quite satisfying to sing. It's got a nice lilt to it in the verses, and the loud bit (now adorned with its choir) was very "different" and inventive for me at the time. It works with just one voice and a guitar in a live situation, but sounds a bit bare on record.

Funnily enough, this song, and a bunch of the others in the batch, is one of the reasons I was getting frustrated with the MBR - no 6/8 rhythms. And then, in the end, I recorded it with no click!! (That caused a few frustrations, I can tell you ) This was because it really is a solo performance song and needs room to breath in the tempo, otherwise it loses some of its effect. I've since discovered the Tempo map functionality on the BR1600, and I'm using it on the next one, but even so, it would have been a huge job to map this one.

The only change I made to the original song (apart from adding a choir and a bass!) was to alter a couple of lyrics to fix the focus properly. The original had "On a wide wooden stair, cleaned with great care, I asked her to leave me alone... etc" - this meant there were two her/she characters in the song and it was a little confusing. The older and wiser Andrew decided that singing directly to a "you" took nothing away and made it all a lot clearer...

I haven't typed out the lyrics yet (too busy recording the next one), when I do they'll be going on Soundclick, I can post them here as well if you want.

Talking of Soundclick, it's interesting that it does seem to sound better on the Songcrafters player - it's the same 192 mp3... I assume Soundclick are compressing it a bit further...

Now... the recording, I am extremely proud of it... BUT! I ballsed up big time on the lead vocal processing! I only found out after I'd posted it and was searching out the instructions to send to someone else. On this one, I put the reverb on the compressed and EQ'd copy of the vocal, not on the natural original as I should have done...

When I came to master the finished track, I had too much clarity in the vocal and had to take top-end off the entire band. This means that the guitars are mellower than intended and, more importantly/annoyingly, the choir at the end is not as crisp and as awe-inspiring as it actually is on the multi-tracks...

During the final day, I was very tempted to prepare a vocal-only mix of the second half of the song to post separately - it sounds well impressive. When my wife came home on the day I'd done the choir, I had a big grin on my face, I sat her down in front of the monitors and everyone's jaw dropped . But I decided against doing a separate post, I have at least one other song where that approach might make more sense. Instead, for the final mix, I decided to drop the guitars/bass considerably when the choir comes in (and that meant adding a second choir underneath to carry the notes from the guitar chords).

Another "issue" for me is the odd annoying crackle - these are coming, mainly, from the lead vocal. It's mouth noises and stuff like that... these would not be so prominent if I hadn't forced a huge reverb onto the heavily compressed and high-boosted copy of the vocal track!

Still, fixing it would take several hours (a couple of remixes, then remastering, then moving the master again to fit the sound effects that were added afterwards) and time is tight and I've moved on to the next one (I'm hoping to post something end of tomorrow before going back to work).

Talking of sound effects - originally I was planning lots of whispering going on all over the place, that would make you keep looking over your shoulder... but after I'd done the clock stuff, I decided that it would cost too much and would probably be too distracting with everything else going on on the track.

I also discovered how easy it is to record straight off the internet!! (that's where the clock noises were collected from) ... er, not too sure about the copyright implications of this, but I reasoned that we've all got grandfather clocks, er, haven't we? Who's to say I didn't record my own!!

Blooby, I'm well pleased that you think the song still takes centre-stage. That was my one concern (actually, it always is - I'm a bit like Whistler on painting: I love the technicalities, but on the finished article the ordinary punter shouldn't be distracted by the techniques and brush-strokes). I was really quite concerned I'd over-done it. My wife also wondered this when she heard it at the end of day two. I explained where it was going, and when she heard it again, finished, she was fairly certain I'd succeeded (I'd have posted it anyway, but I felt better...)

Ted... background behind the song? Er... it's a ghost story, that's about it

I'll chuck the lyrics up when I've done them, but other than that, I think I'd rather leave it unexplained (I'm assuming you meant lyrical background...). It's one of those that might actually paint different pictures than the writer intended - and if I try and explain the images in my head, it might damage the images in the listener's head... does that make sense?

Anyway, thanks for liking it folks

EDIT: Just added the lyrics to the original post.

[j.g.]

This is the standard to aim and work for in all respects of playing, vocals, production and songwriting. A great advert for the BR1600 as well. Both you and the BR have given us a treat with this  -  Thanks for posting.

[chapperz66]

I've just had another listen to this, Andy.  It really is a good song.

Paul