For most of this year I've been researching mastering, which I have no experience of, as I really wanted my vocal songs to be of a much better quality, so I've done a lot of reading and watched many videos, but although I've now done many experiments in Audacity and also bought Rast Sounds' Soren AI mastering I totally failed to achieve the quality I wanted. Calling Soren "AI" is a bit of a stretch as one only has 10 genre selections, 4 style presets and 4 loudness presets and whatever variation I tried ended up with a result less good than the original. A very simple wave editor comes with my CyberLink video app and I had better results with just that, but even then I found nothing I tried sounded significantly better than the original. So although I've done a channel-swap and light remix of this song from a year ago, the quality is about the same, though somewhere along the lines I lowered the volume of the organ a bit too much. From last year's notes:

"… I discovered Argentinean vocalist, Denisse Ferrara, on Fiverr, and she amazingly supplied 9 vocal tracks for this song. I went for a foreign accent vocal to give the song a 'world' flavour, but the downside of that is that some words become obscured due to accent. I'm nonetheless extremely pleased with the result of these vocals - Denisse has brought the song to life. … In the main vocal track I had to up the gain over some phrases and lower 2 or 3, making 24 changes in total, then in the 2nd vocal track I did the same 4 times. All in all it took me 2 weeks to get the balance of all 9 tracks as I wanted them."

Last year I also posted the "[smooth]" version of the song with a different vocalist, but I had one failed attempt with the "[baroque]" with a Fiverr Indian vocalist, then 2 long lasting disastrous experiences with a foreign lady who misrepresented herself as English, then ditto with an American lady, both of the latter 100% failing to understand the exact same instructions which the 1st 3 clearly understood, but long story short I've ended up using the "[smooth]" version vocalist's stem files on the "[baroque]" and it's turned out to be the best version of the 3, so that I'll post after I later post the "[smooth]". Always leave the best until last!

As this is a very long intro the full lyrics are on the YouTube post, so please click on 'watch on YouTube' if you're interested. Other than the title and end title images there's only one image in the video so as not to detract from the music and lyrics.

Cast in order of appearance:
Warm Pad & Strings: Enya44 - Soft Ev. Techno Orche ~ uncredited
Kalimba: World Beat 2 South African Dance ~ uncredited
Marimba ~ Key Island Groove Quartet ~ Todd London
Vocals: real human being ~ Denisse Ferrara
Bass: Country Rock Guitar Solo Pop Band ~ Tobin Frank
Drums: Slow County Pop w/ Tenor Solo ~ Brian Fullen
Organ: Country Rock Guitar Solo Pop Band ~ Gene Rabbai
Piano: East Dock Latin Fusion Gtr Solo ~ Jeff Lorber
Acoustic Guitar: 3 Guitar Country Rock ~ Tony King
Guitar solo: Modern Groove Soloist, Brit Rock ~ Dave Cleveland

4/4 ~ C ~ 95 bpm ~ 156 bars ~ 6:24


Some favourite Waoist Adages:
#1: Play on the Way.
#13: Ask not for whom the flower blooms, it blooms for you.
#58: Bring consciousness to it.
#63: On the road to effortlessness, effort must be made.
#92: Be Love Now, the rest will come on its own.