How I Did It
Uses samples from:
Samples are used in:
Tools I Used
Garageband mostly, which handles latency better than any other program.
Audacity for supplemental recordings and some editing.
Live 5, where everything was spliced together.
Squier Telecaster and Washburn acoustic, and my own voice.
Samples I Used
Cirrus reborn.
Original Samples
my own voice.
Process
I started by loading Cirrus reborn into garageband. The first thing I added was the virtual rhodes, using the electric piano setting with an auto pan. Then, during the course of a single, late night session, I overdubed a series electric guitar parts.
Two lead parts were panned to the left, so as not to compete with the existing lead guitar, and were both layered on top of one another, with a lot of delay.
As the original track ended and the rhodes closed out with a four chord pattern, there was suddenly a hole in the right side of the field, so a slide guitar was recorded and panned to the right.
A drone guitar was then recorded for the duration of the track, with a tremendous amount of reverb and delay to make the individual notes bleed together into a single tone.
The piano at the end of the tail was then recorded to add some wheight.
A fadeout was then programmed.
After the fadeout, I placed a reversed and slowed down portion of the original track, on top of which I sequenced a series of samples of myself humming drones. These were given considerable amounts of delay.
I then recorded an acoustic guitar playing a 3/4 refrain of the chord progression as played by the rhodes earlier in the piece. A sine/square synth was added and heavily delayed along with this piece, and reverb was used as a seque from this and the previous part.
Each of the sections were then cut and faded into one another.
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Throughout the entire piece, timing was a constant issue, which is one of the reasons why the many overdubs seem somewhat disjointed or out of place.
Dynamics were also an issue, and tremendous amounts of compression and limiting were used, often with audible side effects.
Tone was much less of an issue, and eq was kept to a minimum.
Mixing was also a challenge, as I did not want the new tracks to overpower the old ones nor did I want them to get buried.
Other Notes
I'm not sure the exact moment that this idea had come to me. Certainly when I heard this track, the chance to put my idea to practice had arrived.
It's not so much that I'm rejecting the more conventional wisdom, it's just that the same approach never seems to work for me twice in a row. Either way, I'd like to think that this track has a lot more of me in it and is less confined by the technology that was used to make it.
Of course, that doesn't mean I wasn't slightly nervous about submitting it.
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It's long been the goal of my Dalia alter ego to create music inspired by dreams, and I hope that the dreamscape nature of this track does come across.
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