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Sweden, day 11 ::
9 hours sleep last night. Made some progress on assembling the new arrangement for Where You Lay before starting the session. Christoffer did a great cut-and-paste job on arranging Talking Points with input from Justin and me, mostly removing (lots of) extraneous bits and accentuating/repeating the best ones. That took a lot of the afternoon.
We listened to Don’t Know I Know with Justin, who wasn’t here when Christoffer and I looked at it on Friday. We agreed that there won’t be any structural changes, just more replacing and augmenting of tracks from my demos.
Then we transferred Implications, the first song we worked on and the only one not yet in Digital Performer, from Logic and analog tape (Jens’ drums and processed castanets). Overdubs:
- Justin playing guitar through a massive chain of analog effects which Christoffer tweaked on the fly (our “guitar fishtank”)
- Christoffer playing bass processed through the Access Virus
- me playing occasional chords and melodic fragments on Wurlitzer organ and Hohner string machine
- me playing glockenspiel through another analog monstrosity including a miked guitar amp in the room I was playing in, loud enough to hurt my ears if I took off the headphones
- strings on a digital audio plug-in that is a faithful replica of a Mellotron
We’re close to being done with this one. 2 down, 7 to go. 7 days left. That probably means finishing 2 a day for the last 4 days, since Tuesday and Wednesday will be drum days, the string quartet will be here Thursday afternoon, and Helena will sing Thursday night. That seems only marginally sane yet not impossible.
Justin and I liked the so-called crappy Danish roadside restaurant we went to last week so much that we went back this evening. Justin got a chicken dish baked on a piece of wood, with an amazing potato concoction (mashed and squeezed through some kind of pastry/icing nozzle and then baked?). I had a nice fish dish with boiled potatoes.
We were all a bit low-key today, as if consciously conserving energy. Stopped promptly at midnight.
Spent half an hour back at the guest house trying to work out a click track for the ambient/free time first half of Don’t Know I Know. About 80% of it is reasonably straightforward, but there are a few passages without a discernible regular pulse. Now I’m doubting that Jens should play percussion on top of an imperfect click track on top of an imperfect piano track which will be replaced (unless the magic of the piece gets diminished by doing so). I will suggest that I take a shot at redoing the piano track while Jens is here, either before he plays on it, or maybe even better, at the same time.
* * *
At 2 am it is still light in the northwest (north?) and the full moon is very low in the sky to the south. Beautiful.
* * *
3 am: birds are singing, and the light in the sky is not at all far east from where it was an hour ago. I’ve started scoring the strings in the big orchestral section of Agents of Change. How does one arrange for a string quartet anyhow? I have 7-note chords, OK, 5 notes after removing the doubled octaves. Remembering Christoffer’s words of experience ... low notes sound least objectionable when played by samplers ... a single violin on a part can sound a little thin, prefer two violins on the same note where possible ... double-tracking can lead to trouble. I’ll just do my best and check the parts with the best sounds I can scrounge up in the studio sometime before Thursday. There’s a first time for everything; today I get to learn to arrange for a string quartet!
* * *
4 am: One string chart done, 4 to go.
| << Day 10: Copenhagen | 2005 > June | Sweden, day 12 >> |