Up 'Round The Bend (Instrumental)

Not much of a story with this one. I bought the new Samplemodeling Solo & Ensemble Strings (ka-ching!) and figured I better use them in a song to help justify all that money I spent. wink

After browsing through the styles, I found the TRUBLUE.STY demo. I played around with the chord progression, and changed it from ABA to ABC and adding an intro.

Strings, brass and woodwinds were played on my USB EWI, and the MIDI guitar and mandolin parts with a keyboard controller.

Musically, I'm not entirely sure how well this holds together. I think it lacks a strong melody. The parts outline the harmony and move mostly stepwise, but it probably lacks enough contrast.

Per usual, I played a bunch of instrument parts, and then threw a bunch of stuff out, as well as simplifying a bunch of parts so they played nice together.

There's a whole lot more resonator guitar solo that I expected, but it's a lot of fun to play.

There are some places where there are probably too many acoustic guitar-ish parts - I'm really tempted to drop the mandolin from the mix. But I've taken out all it's good parts, so I figure it should get a few bits.

I used a much wider stereo spread on this mix than I typically do, because... why not? You tell me.

I also suspect I pushed the volume of mix a bit much, but my ears are too tired to tell at this point.

So rather than taking a break and coming back to it, I'll just post it. whistle

As always, all feedback welcome!

Instruments
~1636:Bass, Electric, JazzFunkBreezy Ev16 075
~2505:Piano, Electric, HeldChords 085
664:Guitar, Acoustic, Rhythm SouthernRock Ev 085 (A:fpick)
SouthernPopEv16^03-a:Hat, Snare, b:Ride, Snare

Violin, Cello, Trumpet - Sample Modeling
Nylon String, Resonator, Slide, Mandolin - Indiginus
English Horn - Audio Modeling
Percussion Loops - Essential Acoustic Percussion

Mixing Triva
Lurssen Mastering Console, Ozone Imager
Reverbs, EQ, Compression - Neutron Elements, EZMix

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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