I am pleased to report after a prolonged silence that the next AHAS track is on its way out for mastering. It has been a particularly busy stretch for me, and my obligations outside of music have made it difficult to make time for the laborious mixing process over the last few months. At long last however, after a graciously granted evening session last night, the next song is mixed and out the door. With luck it'll be posted within a couple of weeks.
I know I had said that the next song would be "10 Miles," but that is no longer the case. Instead, "Answer" will be the next one out of the gate. Why the change of plan? I was struggling mightily with 10 Miles as we were trying to pull it together. The arrangement as it was performed was exceedingly simple and minimal and my initial thought was to keep it really stripped down, with a single guitar, and let the vocal carry the tune (it's a melody I'm relatively pleased with). We tried various techniques to widen the single guitar by panning mics, adding reverb, or using a delayed signal panned opposite the source, but I ultimately found them all to make the guitar sound a bit "squishy" and lose most of its character and attack. I ultimately decided to take some time and rethink the arrangement a bit. After several long sessions at my own rehearsal space experimenting with keyboard and guitar sounds and trying to come up with stuff, I finally hit on some keyboard sounds that worked at the 11th hour, with a mixing/recording session scheduled for the following day. I had also devised a washy, heavily delayed guitar sound with tremolo to play open ringing chords during the dramatic parts. Suddenly the song was taking some shape, and at the mixing session the following day I tracked the guitars and keyboards (using the patches I had already created) and started shaping the thing. We also did some doubling of the vocals for emphasis (and help).
Long story short, the song is coming together really nicely now and I'd say is about 85% ready, but during this time we'd made significant progress on Answer and when push came to shove Pat and I decided it would be a better second release anyway. I'm really pleased with how it came out for a song that I've previously been on the fence about, often considering it my weakest contribution to our repertoire. I think it gained a lot from a brief practice session just before our initial tracking sessions. Pat had been fussing with that bass line since day 1, never quite satisfied with what he was doing with it. But he had finally settled on something he liked and I insisted that we go through it several times and really try to lock up the groove so that my kick hits would fall on his bass hits. Not only did we get a better groove going, we nicely developed the contrast where the chord shifts during the verse by switching from an on-the-upbeat groove to an on-the-downbeat one, then back again. I also had suggested a few rhythmic things I was doing on the kick during the chorus that Pat could follow on bass. The thing just sounds a good deal tighter than it ever did before, and the sureness of the groove lets the melody propel the song.
I also threw in some complementary shaker and tambourine stuff during the half-time bridge section, giving it a nice chunky backbeat. A little organ here and there rounds the thing out in what is arguably a less dense arrangement than Aloud, but still surprisingly challenging to balance. That said, I do think the finished product exceeds our first effort sound-wise and I hope y'all will like it.
Stay tuned for more posts and a release date.
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