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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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!

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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