So I'm going to dump all the "finished" tracks here so you can see I'm not just hanging around being irritating - I am working. They're only roughly mixed and I'm not looking for mix feedback necessarily at this stage, but weigh in with that if you want to. Because you won't necessarily know where the intro ends and the verse begins they may seem a bit slow to get going. They're also way simpler than what I've done, in terms of instrumentation. Not too many guitars...
Give you a brief blurb about each.
I had this all tracked out in my head and just did it to a click, but when I was programming the drums I realised I'd created a monster - soooo many timing changes. The main theme is in 7/8, which is something I like doing, but there are various bars of 5/8, 6/8, 8/8 in there are well. It sounds like something, but I can't figure what...
I'd forgotten I'd even recorded this - it uses the sort of chord progression I do a lot of on acoustic - sitting with an open D string and doing lots of 4 note chord variations to make the verses - anyway, I found it the other day and knocked up some drums for it and then put a melody guitar against it.
I retracked the damn bass on this several times before getting that swingy feel on it. I went down a rabbit hole in trying to move notes around to get it all happening but as usual, that's a waste of time - just play it properly. Anyway, it goes from this sort of riffy feel to some almost Steely Dan chording in the chorus to a middle 8 that ended up sounding way "heavier" than I thought it would. Something to annoy everyone.
Things were getting a bit samey so I decided to start this one with a chorus section - and it's an unusual chord progression - a version of C followed by an A/Cm variation that appears in a lot of my stuff, then into a very riffy main section. No middle 8 in this one. Sort of Artic Monkeys feel to it, perhaps.
And then this monster...
It's pretty long and it's meant to probably end up with an almost spoken word storytelling sort of vocal to it - and the bass playing is supposed to drive you nuts and increase the tension with its relentless insistence on sitting on the same single note for more than 6 minutes, before sweet release in the last 10 seconds... this will be an album ender, I think, I know how it will work out in my head, but I just have to get it there. I've probably done less mix work on this one than the others.So there you go. 5 tunes. Ideas 3 and 5 you've already heard and Idea 7 isn't developed enough yet. Armistice overload!!!!!
And there are other underdeveloped bits in my tickler file I can work on as well.
I can only imagine the work it took to get the drums to fit. You did an awesome job!
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