After Yesterday (Instrumental)

Noel posted a kind response my last instrumental, which reminded me it was time to do something new. Since I'm continuing to be fallow on the lyric front, I decided to make another instrumental, and - unlike my usual process - try to get it out the door quickly.

So I fired up BIAB and went through the various styles. I liked what I heard in the _RISING.STY demo, so I loaded it up, and altered a bunch of the chords so it wasn't a complete copy. wink

I then added electric piano, acoustic piano and fiddle, and exported the audio tracks to Reaper.

After listening to the fiddle part, I decided not to use it, but pilfer some of the ideas to help work out a melody, as well as keep some of the idiomatic fiddle feel when playing the violin part. I played the violin part on my EWI, and ended up pitching it up to a higher register.

The cello was also played in with the EWI. It's a fairly simple part, basically following the bass with some stepwise motion between roots. There's not really any interplay between the cello and melody, mostly because I was hurrying to get things done.

To make it more interesting, I decided to give the middle to the guitar. The steel string wasn't working, so I ended up using a nylon string.

In contrast with the melody, I wanted the guitar part to have space - basically arpeggios and a bit of linear movement. I ended up reworked it quite a bit. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it'll do.

I like to have variety in instrumentation, so I ended up giving the initial part to the flute. That led to reworking the dynamics of the initial section so it could stand out better. I ended choosing a single measure that wasn't too busy from the original drum part, and looped that. To add a bit more texture, I added some percussion loops.

In the intro, there was an irritating "thump" from one of the instruments. While soloing the parts to track it down, I decided that I really liked the sparse sound, so that's why the intro comes in as quietly as it does.

I didn't do that much finessing of the sound. I used EZMix and Izotope Neutron on some of the instruments, and the Lurrson Console for mastering. There's also a stereo widener.

I didn't mix on headphones, so it's quite likely I'll revisit the mix to fix some things there. For example, the fingerpicked guitar is panned a bit, but feels odd when it starts off. I may center it for the intro, and then shift it once the song's started.

I usually try to get a bit of interplay between instruments on the melody line, but there's not space in the melody line for that. Sticking with my goal of getting this done quickly, I left it as-is. But I may go back and rework the ending so there's some exchange between the violin and another instrument.

As always, comments of all sorts welcome!


Instruments
~2474:Bass, Acoustic, Held Ev 085
~2505:Piano, Electric, HeldChords 085
2914:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking Folky16thsBrent Ev16 085
~2503:Piano, Acoustic, HeldChords 085
RealDrums PopPromiseEv16
Cello, Violin, Flute: Audio Modeling SWAM instruments
Nylon Guitar: Indiginus Renaxxance

-- David Cuny

My virtual singer development blog
Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?

BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.