what's it all about?

dark times of the soul.  dark times when you feel things you shouldn't.  dark times when your challenge all you held dear.  dark times when the things you held dear challenge you to breaking point.  dark times when you just need to remember who you are.  dark times when the shadows threaten to overtake you, engulf you completely and take away your very identity.  dark times when your creativity is questioned and crushed.  dark times when all there is left to cling to is the dignity of self.

a piece from way back in the early days of the studio and a time i care to forget.  this is the strangest thing about being a musician, you often commit these things to recording and so you spend the rest of your life actually being reminded of them rather than burying them.  though cathartic in some ways, there are still times when the surface gets scratched more than a little.  solo singer/songwriters beware!

the solo is really when it all comes out here.  paul cudby (e&tg drummer) often comments that he can tell exactly my mood by what my solos do, the closest to my true soul if you will.  

that said, it's actually quite a hopeful song for me.  it contains a lot of me, and i'm quite comfy with me.  so it's that splendid isolation thing going on, and that happy with my own company & creativity philosophy, which when all else fails you have to fall back on and keep precious and close.

this piece actually started as a two hand tap piece with the swooping lead over the top.  eventually as the piece developed, the tap died away leaving the rest of the piece to grow up in a wild and crazy world of its own.

instruments & tone sources

the piece was actually written in two sections; the main track from 4 bars in, and then top and tailed about two and a half years later with the slightly softer loop and bassline.

fairly simple.  the electrics are ibanez through the old zoom 2020, not great but good for this piece.  the top and tail guitars are fly / pod.

we're back to that 'guitar as string section' feel here again - the lead and harmonies are handled by four separate guitars, smoothed out to form this little stream of guitars.

the bass in the main track is an old squier bass of phil's and the top and tail bassline is done on the beefier washburn - hence the slightly more r&b quality to it.

the drums are quite odd:  the main track is the old Roland R5, and i think sounds okay but you can hear than slightly broken quality to the snare that was so characteristic of that old drum machine.  the top and tail loop is the zoom234 played manually to lock in with the r5 loop.

all keyboards are jv1080.

production comments

tricky thing getting two parts of a piece recorded nearly 3 years apart on two systems one at 16bit the other at 24bit to sound vaguely similar, but i like a challenge.  simplest way?? make it sound like a transition point, change the riff a nadge - or as in this case, run a completely new bassline in that runs all the way through both sections to bring some solid anchor for all the rest.  here, the bass was the last thing added, which is quite cool for something that's supposed to be the bedrock of the track.

otherwise, the track is fairly straightforward.  it has some postmix bass enhancement and a little top sparkle and width added from the vitalizer and then the usual plug-in mastering stuff in DP.

i like the track for its simplicity i guess.  the manually done guitar chorussing gives it a nice width, and i was careful to make the solo rise up from that little canvas to stand out - so the solo guitar recorded originally on the zoom, got slung out at the mix stage through the pod amp sim for a little extra va-va-voom.