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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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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OK, now we’re getting down towards the finish line.  Enough talk, I hear you say (or was it just the wind?) We’ve had lots of stuff written about the music… but what does it all actually sound like?

Well, now you can hear for yourself.

In a series of posts, I’m going to present short extracts of each track as I get a final mix in the bag.

So starting at the beginning, here is is just over a minute from the title track Fantasy Bridge.

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I have been mixing in every spare moment for the last 2 weeks.

And frankly, I just don’t know any more…

I just can’t say if this stuff is any good or not.

I’m swinging between – “This is awesome” to “Oh my, it’s all complete garbage”  All I can say for sure is. it’s DIFFERENT.  If I put on some commercial mixes they are completely different from my efforts (I seem to have discovered at least one if not two octaves in the bottom end where commercial music just doesn’t go – is that a bad thing? Darned if I know). THen listening in the car I think that my mid range is a bit cluttered.  Then another listen and commercial material all sounds like the dread Smiley Face EQ has been at work.

Some people I trust have told me this isn’t unusual.  A kind of “Recording Ears Burnout” that at least three people have told me they experienced when mixing their own albums.  The only way they suggest to sort it is to leave it alone for a couple of weeks. Get some space from the songs, listen to something else entirely. So this is what I’m going to do. As far as the audio is concerned. Fantasy Bridge is on hold.  I might spend some time looking at the artwork, or the packaging etc, but I’m going to try to leave Logic unopened for a while.

Which actually fits in with real life.  Because I’m off to Paris for the day job this week, I’m in London the week after and then we take a week off to a secluded cabin in Cornwall, far away from distractions like making an album.

There might be some ad-hoc entries apropos music tech and maybe artwork in the meantime but the next time we discuss the album is likely to be May.

With hopefully some recalibration of the old ears successfully completed.

This week I’ve mostly been mixing.

Clearly these aren’t final mixes but I needed to do this to get the tracks a bit more streamlined, bouncing MIDI virtual instrument parts down to real audio, all in preparation for moving the logic project files over to the portable hard drive.

This is so that I can easily move between the studio iMac and the Macbook Pro (which now is fully ‘Logiced-Up’ ) for the big drum recording session which is tomorrow. Yay!

Along the way, I’ve taken the time to do some editing and mixing following the last two sessions with Andy and Adam, and I am really happy with the Acoustic parts in Together and A Day by the Sea, and the new bass parts in ADBTS have really lifted the feel, particularly in the 6/8 instrumental.

Also coming under scrutiny were the big multi-tracked vocal harmonies in Children of a Forgotten Sun, Don’t Give Up on Love and ADBTS . I have created vocal groups in each case and used Logic’s Focusrite compressor model in each case.  This has helped to blend the vocals together in a really lovely way.

So the tracks are now all on the portable firewire drive, the MacBook has had the Alesis mixer drivers installed. I have all the mics ready and cabling up together.  So hopefully my next entry will be all about drums.

The first track is done!

Bar any nasties detected when trying it on different sound systems, I think I’ve finished mixing Dawn. It’s the only track that has no drums, bass, guitars.  It’s just keys and orchestral programming.  Clearly, it would be better with the addition of an entire symphony orchestra, but since we are a little lower-budget around here, the orchestral parts are courtesy of Garritan Personal Orchestra. Which in orchestral sample libraries is also low budget. (Some of the top libraries around cost almost as much as hiring an orchestra!) but I think with some careful programming, it’s capable of quite amazing things, and whilst it’s not going to fool a discerning listener that it’s the real deal, it does provide a lovely sonic canvas when working in the classical idiom.

Anyway, while we are on the subject of mixing, and apropos the picture at the top of the post; more than one sort of mixing goes into making an album around here…  Regular tracking sessions have been augmented by the addition of the odd late night cocktail provided by the ever-supportive Mrs Green.  Of late the favourites have been various martinis, and of course the ever popular Tequila Sunrise. And while I can’t say definitively that these libations aid the creative process, I can confirm that they are nonetheless a refreshing adjunct to it.

Cheers!

(or the tribulations of mixing prog-rock.)

So here’s the thing.  This prog stuff is complicated.

I am right now struggling with getting a mix I like of Children of a forgotten Sun (and along the way deciding that one of the key changes didn’t work without another 36 bars of new music to make it sound like it was not contrived! – but that is another story, for another day.)

In the traditional rock song, you get an intro, a verse or two, a chorus or two, maybe a guitar solo, an outro and a fade. Instruments come in, vocals come in, and that’s about it. And come mix time there are some tried and tested rules that work well in getting things to balance, things to blend well, things to cut through, things to sit in the front, things to sit in the back.

Children is a rather different beast.  There is a longish ambient start with a solo Dave Gilmore-esque guitar over washy synths.  This leads into the slow intro part, replete with harmony vocals building into an instrumental section which introduces one of the major motifs of the song, before giving way to another vocal section, echoing the intro, and then kicking up the tempo into a big full-on instrumental section.  With me so far? This instrumental leads into what feels like a second movement.  Different key, different tempo, different time signature (and this is where the new music was needed to make sense of the transition, by echoing the previous section in the new key before launching into the main ‘children’ anthem). Finally the key changes again and the final section echos the main pre-anthem motif before breaking down into the outro section which reprises the ambient start.  Phew!

Everything I learned about mixing seems to fail on this song. Balance the vocals for one section and they sound buried in another, EQ the guitars to cut through in another section and they are completely overpowering in yet another, etc, etc.  So I’m going to have to seriously automate the mix.  Break down the sections, make them sound ok in their own right and move on to the next.  treat  each section as a mini-song in its own right and take it from there.

Wish me luck!