After several hours of attempting to make an electric piano solo work, I finally gave in. I struggled with this bit first time around, and knew it was sub-standard. I thought I had been having an off-day when I recorded it (after all I cannot be at the peak of creative genius every day). So coming back to it I thought "I can do better than that". Several days later, after lots of trying, frustration and self-doubt I finally did the sensible thing and gave up on the electric piano.
So then the search for a sound started. The section is all about electricity, so I felt the need to find something relatively related to that. Hmm. Synth? Already got some, and looking for a good synth sound different to the first one didn't really produce anything. Electric guitar? Well... there's always that, but maybe I shouldn't rely on guitars ALL the time, right? Electric something else?
Violin?
I have a sampled violin. Violins, like saxophones and guitars are notoriously hard to sound real from samples. How about embracing the fakeness and using the violin that sounds like an electric violin more than anything?
Bingo! Much happier. Random soloing over first half, and even a tune over the second half.
Now we need the old elapsed time to see if it is good enough, in my relief at getting something halfway decent I might have over-estimated how good it really is. Time, time time....
Then into the next section, and lots of confusion over a trumpet sound, which I still cannot adequately explain. I have a trumpet which is part of a brass part (actually just two trumpets) and then for one bit it breaks out into a trumpet solo. It needs to move from the side to the centre and have a volume boost.
Because it's being played form the sampler with several other sounds, it's not easy to do this on the "channel" because they all come through the same channel. What I am increasingly doing in this situation is spawning another sampler on another channel to give separate control. For some reason (and this is the unfathomable bit) having done that I couldn't make it louder than a whisper. It was really weird. with everything turned up it was pathetic.
So back to having it in the original sampler - you can put automation on the settings in the sampler, so I recorded the changes for that bit, push the trumpet to the middle and boost the volume. Seems OK. Play back the automation: oh! For some reason it applies the automation to ALL of the channels.
Finally a small idea: use insert effects. This only works because at the point of the solo, nothing else in the sampler is being played. Also because you can automate the effects as well, including turning them off and on. One effect to centre the sound (bizarrely the "mono-to-stereo" effect does this) and another to provide a bit of a boost. Sorted.
What else have I done?
Ah yes, elongated the tail of some crowd sounds in some football commentary so that it can fade more gently (just take some crowd sound and loop it for a while), and moved the end of the last section of the first track so that there is a little gap between tracks.
And done the vitally important "get rid of the humming and singing" in the last section. It has been replaced by... flute. And an extra bit of flute added after the guitar accompaniment finishes, as if the flut player had gone "oh I like that tune, let's try it again" after everyone else has gone. And then it fades towards the end, gets added reverb and has a weird stuttery effect applied as it fades into the distance, nicely making it sound like it's breaking up.
And that's phase two, round one track one done. Already listening a bit there are things that will need to be altered.
The plan is that a "round" is a period of listening, followed by making changes through the whole album. I am focusing on real musical changes not changes to level and effect on instruments if I can, that comes in phase 3: mastering. I plan at least 3 rounds in phase 2, but there might be a difficulty in knowing when to stop. I will need to stop sometime.
Man, this album is getting more work than any of the previous ones did - and not just because it is longer!
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