PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production Bluegrass/country song arrangement quandary [Resolved]

Thanks for your suggestions, but I had previously experimented with most if not all of those instruments and found them to clash sonically with the overall sound of my arrangement---especially the banjo. I also tried a few harmonica tracks and even an autoharp, but those didn't mesh well either. The fiddle seemed to clash the least, but I'm not familiar enough with bluegrass music or even with country music to create a good-sounding fiddle track in BiaB that would go with the rest of the instruments in my arrangement, so that's why I decided to hire a pro fiddle player on Fiverr who knows both genres very well. She even plays in a bluegrass band with other members of her family. However, when I hired her, I asked her to create a fiddle track that supports my arrangement without overpowering it. So, that's probably why her track "doesn't sound country enough" to you.

One of the issues I've been struggling with is determining exactly which genre my song falls into with the arrangement style I chose for it in BiaB. When I shared it with my mother who loves both country and bluegrass music, she said that it's a bluegrass song. But the fiddle player I hired referred to it as a country song. After reading your post, I spent most of the day analyzing my song while I listened to the custom fiddle track with different combinations of all the instruments that are in my arrangement. In the process, I was able to determine that guitarhacker was correct when he said that it's more like a country ballad instead of a bluegrass song. And yet, it does have some bluegrass characteristics, which is why the mandola works well with the arrangement. It's just not a full-blown "foot-stomping, hand-clapping" bluegrass song, which is fine with me because none of my other songs are bluegrass songs either. Most of them are various combinations of folk, pop, rock, country, and orchestral. This is the first song I've written that ventures outside of those genres because of it's bluegrass characteristics, which is probably the main reason I've been having so much trouble figuring out how to finalize the arrangement and determining which instrument would be best suited for doing that until I realized that a fiddle would probably do the trick. But when I listened to the custom fiddle track with my arrangement and noticed that it seemed to clash at times with certain parts of the arrangement, I was baffled. That's why I decided to submit an inquiry to this forum nearly two weeks ago.

When I shared the custom fiddle track with my producer at the end of a session we had later that same day, he said that it sounded fantastic "as is" with all the instruments in his arrangement (except for the strings, which he had muted). But I wasn't convinced, so I spent most of the following day (the same day you posted your reply to my OP) figuring out why and eventually realized that the fiddle track was clashing with my piano track in certain places because it wasn't upbeat enough. So, I decided to find out if BiaB had a fiddle that sounded comparable to the custom track I was evaluating and if I could use it to create a more upbeat fiddle track that I could borrow parts from to improve the custom fiddle track. My efforts were somewhat successful but took too much time to make it worthwhile except as a last resort. That's when I realized that I should go back to the fiddle player I hired and ask her for a revision that was more upbeat and had some higher notes in it. When I mentioned this to my producer and shared part of the BiaB fiddle track with him, he said that we shouldn't do that until we've perfected his arrangement using her original custom fiddle track as a base reference. So, we spent the next five days perfecting his arrangement so that she would have a much better arrangement to use as her reference for creating a revised fiddle track. She sent me her revised fiddle track two days ago, but I didn't have time to listen to it until today. I have to say that I'm very pleased with how it sounds when I listen to it with the new arrangement even though both haven't been professionally mixed and mastered together yet. I've uploaded a copy to my Box account at the link below. Let me know what you think of it. Thanks again for your comment and suggestions!

https://app.box.com/s/z87yivfjead5gxux7equgaexq4jeavkr

Tom