More of Matty’s overdubs, and my voice craps out…

We start with If I were a song because I know the basic sound from The Flipside, without the echo will be fine for this song.

Very similar to Man Overboard – the parts are there from the Small Ensemble version. It’s just a question of finding how much we need and how much adaptation is needed from acoustic to electric – not much in this case. M figures out a nice chorus arpeggio to replace the 1,2,3 1,2,3 thing that sounds too similar to Man Overboard (I didn’t write the song Broken Record for no reason…)

The meat of the day is taken by Rod The Mod – Matty has lots of ideas and we have plenty of empty tracks…

We use M’s Ampeg for a grittier sound, but not overdone, just not clean…

First part – he doubles the main acoustic riff, but an octave down and just the first half of the melody, leading in to a crash chord. Quite early Townshend-ish actually.

Then he has this Richard Thompson bendy thing to follow the riff which we combine as if it were on part, which is sounds like it is. Very cool and definitely adding a left field vibe to the track.

Then the verse part, which we had discussed and M and I had an idea of a vibe which would work, but specifics were not ironed out. This needs to be done now and it takes a while, but it is altogether worth it – the combination of a Harrison-esque jangle and a Woodsy/Cropper thing works really well and helps the vocal melody, too.

Now the tricky bit. M has a counter melody arpeggio idea for the chorus which threatens to make the song great if it succeeds, or aural mud if it fails… He plays it on the acoustic guitar and it definitely works when it is in the pocket (in time with right feel) but is this one guitar too many?

So we try it on banjo too and it definitely has it’s own place in the track, but the lack of sustain makes it almost a percussion track, which is wrong – so I suggest me make and amalgam ‘banj-itar’ mixing the two signals. It works! MAM may well still be cursing me, because it takes a good while of waveform editing to get the two to sound like one, but they do now.

Result! Rough mix. Move on.

As Matty is in banjo mode we move to Broken Record, unsure whether banjo will work with full band or not. We play though a few tines and it is definitely taking less aural space than the acoustic ‘banjo’ part. So we plough in. It takes a while – M only started playing banjo when I asked him to do so and I can’t imagine a novice figuring out such a great part – the only bits which don’t seem to work are the ‘crash’ chords, which seem to disappear in the track (I’m already thinking piano might be nice for these). A few parts need to be edited or re-written but we’re done sooner than we expected and I guess I might as well sing this one, as it is up…

Except my voice feels wrong, my throat is dry and the result is awful. I sing a few passes> A line here and there is good, but when I finally come back to listen, it’s clear after a minute that all is not right. Bed time. I’ll sing in the AM.