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Evolution of a song, and a little bit of my evolution as an artist over the last year and beyond...

I posted this song as one of my earlier BIAB projects. 9 months later -- I've learned so much about production and also gotten more confident with my voice. Turns out confidence is a key ingredient in vocals. I mean, you can't get by on confidence alone, but if you DON'T have it, your vocals will suffer and reflect that.

Also, from my pre-BIAB days an earlier production of mine had a xylophone in it. I thought with the nice, lavish piano track I didn't need it anymore, plus it was recorded at a different tempo. And I really didn't want to try to re-do the xylophone, because yeah, I have one, but I'm not so much a xylophone player as someone who can do some very simple things on one if he practices it enough and records enough takes that he can splice together something that sounds like somebody who knows how to play the xylophone.

I always thought the BIAB track sounded ... well much better than my pre-BIAB version, but that it was missing something.

For one thing, I never got my xylophone out for the "sting" -- and instead faked it by playing a note on the guitar and bumping it up like 2 octaves. I was never happy with it. I wanted the xylophone "sting". I thought I might want to try other parts of the xylophone track - it reflects our innocence at the time of this relationship ... but ... you know as I said before, different tempo, and more work than I was willing to do at the time.

But recently I learned how "stretch" works in Reaper.

I retrieved my xylophone track and made it fit the current tempo and plopped it in there, then re-did the lead vocal which, due to my higher confidence level of today sounds a lot easier ... freer. Better. I also added some sustained cymbal crashes where BIAB had put some muffled ones on "Stop" chords" and a few other places.

So this is what I'm trying to do with each of these songs for the CD. Make my compositions sound as good as I can get them to sound. And I'm diggin' this.

The original link on this post points to the new mix.

If you're curious enough to compare, here's my pre-BIAB version: Elizabeth Anne - Pre BIAB

And my first BIAB version: Elizabeth Anne - First BIAB version

And here's the one I've been polishing up the past week or so, with the recovered Xylophone track:
Elizabeth Anne - 2019 Remix for CD