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While I like the impact of the French Horn and the Notre Dame cathedral...


Who doesn't? Stuff like GPO4 are wonderful! Personally, I'm a sucker for double reeds.

But it's really easy to go overboard with that kind of stuff. I find that on the stuff I've tried to orchestrate, it sounds much better when I come back and start paring all those parts down until only the bare minimum is left. The remaining parts really have an impact, instead of cluttering up the mix and wearing out the listener's ear. (I'm speaking of my own transgressions, not yours. )

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Since I wrote the song on acoustic guitar, I favour a simple fingerpicking rhythm as the base. Unfortunately RTs that are simple without hammer-ons have not been recorded yet.


Despite the plethora of Guitar Realtracks, there's still a lot of ground that can be covered.

My fingerpicking isn't that great, and getting things quiet enough around my house can be a challenge. I've resorted to MIDI guitar parts with good guitar samples, but that's going well beyond the PG Music workflow. I put together a basic MIDI fingerpicking pattern with a C chord, adjusted the voicing for other chords, and built up the part in a sequencer by hand. But it took a lot of tweaking, hammer-ons didn't sound that great, and still sounded like it was being played by a sampler.

Another thing I played with was just putting together some basic strums, and dropping them into the mix. If you had the same basic pattern, you could (in theory) record the fingerpicking part until you had some good takes, and then build the part out of the best takes. If you've recorded to a click track, this can work out pretty well. Again, that's well beyond the typical PG workflow.

Of course, the best option would be if someone on this forum offered to put down the guitar track.

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Best for the New Year - Ian


Thanks, and the same to you! And I'm looking forward to hearing more music in the coming year.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?