Well.  This is it. The last track on the album, and the final mix preview.

The quintessential English summer holiday, by the sea. As seen though the eyes of a young lad. Replete with sand castles, toy boats, kites, ice cream, the pier amusements, the funfair.  All peppered nicely with a large dose of childhood imagination.

I was that young lad, and I have tried to write a song that captures the spirit of those long ago holiday memories.

The arrangement swings from a quiet voice and acoustic guitar, courtesy of Andy, to a triplet based motif instrumental full of whistling synths, guitars and harpsichords, then into my little homage to the Beatles with the pier visit and the funfair, with guitars provided by Andy and Nick.  Then into a frenetic 6/8 instrumental depicting the roller-coaster ride, with two different Moog modular synth parts playing off a ripping guitar solo from Nick.  This part also features the Morphwiz iPad synth, doing some really nice glissandi.  Then back to a reprieve of the first theme, this time with the band turned up to 11.

This track was a joy to mix. It just came together and clicked.  For me at least it is a fine way to end the album.  I hope you think so too.

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A piano, some bass and a few strings – That’s it.

This is a quiet interlude after the boisterous fun of Don’t Give up on Love.

I’ve experienced the feeling behind this song a couple of times. Standing on a beach in South Australia, looking out to the Southern Ocean.  Somewhere  on the Pacific Coast Highway at sunset, overlooking the Pacific.  Both times and seeing nothing but ocean, as far as the eye can see. Intellectually knowing perhaps that you can see around 3.6 miles (5Km) to the horizon doesn’t matter.  Somehow, deep down, I could feel the empty distance ahead, and could well imagine it went on for ever.

And this instrumental piece attempts to capture something of that feeling. Hopefully you can close your eyes and feel it too.

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You aren’t supposed to favour a child over all the rest are you?  Thing is, of the songs on the Fantasy Bridge project, this one is undoubtedly my favourite.

A dimension spanning, time and space love song, where the protagonists are living in alternative universes, and only know of each other through their mutual dreams.  OK, maybe I have been watching too much Doctor Who… Nah!

Loads of keyboards, layered vocal harmonies, a big Moog Modular solo, electric and acoustic guitars from Nick Crosby, (he does some rather luscious harmonics at one point), gothic choirs, and of course… Cowbell! You can’t have a an album without some cowbell there somewhere.

The track clocks in at around 8 minutes, and I figured that meant more than one clip.

So here are two excerpts for you.  The first is the intro, driven by  heavy-ish  bass riff, that Adam, it should be pointed out rather likes playing. The second is the 2nd verse and chorus fading as the big instrumental starts to kick in (with Adam’s other favourite bass riff!)

There might be a couple of tweaks to this before it goes off to the mastering process, but it’s more or less there.

Enjoy!

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Several years ago, I was at a conference that took place in Montreaux on the banks of Lake Geneva. It is a fantastic place, and early one morning I took a walk along the lake shore. The water was almost like glass and the far side of the lake was almost but not quite invisible.

It was so peaceful.  A moment of quiescence.

Fast forward a couple of years and I was messing with a newly acquired Korg Prophecy and playing along to a sequence I’d discovered from the EMU Proteus and I’d pulled together the bones of a rather cool sounding instrumental.  Then, I had a brainwave! At the time I was quite active on the Cubase web forum cubase.net and one of the regulars over there is the rather amazing Wim Koopman (Known as HornForHire) and as the screen name might imply, he’s rather gifted in the sax department.

Wim agreed to provide a sax solo for the piece and with the addition of some hammond organ it was all but there. So I had this song and no name, and I don’t know the reason, but for me it conjures a serene image of still waters.  Just like that morning on the shore of Lake Geneva.  And so: Quiescence was born.

Fast forward again to 2009 and I was looking for an extra song for the Fantasy bridge project, and here was Quiescence just waiting in the wings on my old music PC.  I kept the audio files from the Prophecy and the Proteus, added some Roland 808-esque drums from the Logic Ultrabeat drum synth, replaced the organ with the ever trusty NI B4II, replaced the bass-line with a Moog modular patch of my own making, and well here we are. Another final mix done.

Yay!

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You may remember me talking about the origins of this song. I wrote it on the occasion of our 20th wedding anniversary for Sue. It is, simply put; a love song.

As it was originally arranged it was fairly straight ahead pop, albeit with a somewhat other-worldly lyrical style. And in that form, it didn’t really fit stylistically with the rest of the album, so it had something of a make-over.

In it’s final form, there are Mellotrons and Taurus basses and a huge synth solo on offer, symphonic strings accompany the outro.  Yes, it’s over the top. But hey, it’s prog right?

This excerpt shows the way the acoustic guitar led verse gives way to the stadium style chorus.

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The instrumental Dawn is my attempt at a tone-poem.  Following the completion of Children of a Forgotten Sun. I had this other piece of music in mind that didn’t fit with that song, but was inspired by the same story.

So this tune describes the first dawn after the million year night from that song.

Musically, it’s an experiment in combining genres.  Taking an electronica bass sequence I found lurking on the  EMU Proteus and a pad whose filter cutoff is controlled by the keyboard aftertouch, and combining it with a full orchestral arrangement and embellished with tempo-synchronised Moog Modular basses and effects, to create what I hope is an interesting soundscape which evokes the feeling of dawn.  A big tutti crescendo of brass strings and woodwind represent the moment the sun crests the horizon, settling back to the main sequenced theme and then fading as the day begins.

Well, that was what I was thinking. Whether you hear that, is, of course, another mater.

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Reading back through the blog I can see that I’ve written very little about this track. In fact I could only spot 2 mentions in total.

Apart from the fact that it was a late entry into the track list, written as a jam with the then newly acquired NI Akoustik Piano, and re-using some lyrics I wrote several years ago, I have said almost nothing about it.

The lyrics came one sunny autumn day, when looking out of my office window, there was a sudden cloudburst.  The sun was right behind the raindrops and they literally sparkled.  It was one of those magical moments, and I just had to commemorate it.

On the face of it, this is a fairly simple song.  The arrangement is sparse, consisting of piano, bass, drums, vocals, a little pad synth in one spot and a lead synth solo outro. It was a great song to record, it has a nice groove to it and was fun to sing and play. I’m really happy with this mix.

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This is the big one! In fact, everything about this song is big…

Topping out at 14 minutes long, it’s certainly the longest song on the album.  It Features multiple tempo changes, time signature changes and key signature changes.  It has some awesome sci-fi inspired lyrics by the amazing Mr Ted Barrett who I met on the Cubase user forum. These lyrics tell the story of the million year cyclic evolution of the Scale Birds and the poet who sings their song.

It also features some blistering guitar playing by Nick Crosby, and it turned out to be the most ambitious song on the album both musically and technically.

In a word: Prog-tastic!

It has also shown itself to be the most difficult to mix, as each ‘movement’ has it’s own balance requirements, so there is much fader automation going on, lots of tweaking here and there in EQ, effects pans, etc.  Getting it to the point of a mix I’m happy with is a most satisfactory feeling.

But such a big song can’t really be represented by a snippet lasting a mere minute, so I give you 3 (yes three) excerpts to enjoy.

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Stay tuned for further previews!

A quick extra post about the drums.  I thought, just for fun, I’d give you  a flavour of before and after the processing to add the new kick and snare drums.  These audio samples are from the start of Fantasy Bridge.

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Raw drums.

This first example is pretty much what was recorded.  There is a bit of EQ and compression, and I’ve mixed the levels to get a balance to the kit.

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Drums with new kick and snare

This example uses the Steven Slate samples (In this case a Pearl kick drum and what they describe as the Led Zep snare) each sampleset has multiple samples and a round-robin algorithm that chooses a slightly different sample on each hit as well as different samples depending on drum hit velocity.  This helps keep the augmented drums pretty natural sounding.

Currently I’m working on the drums for A Day By the Sea, and I got an email from Nick today saying that he is working on the Day by the Sea guitar solo. I’m really looking forward to that!