I’ve been remastering some of the old songs that I wrote and recorded in the early ‘80’s. They were recorded on a Tascam 4 track cassette, and there was a lot of combining or “bouncing” of tracks in order to come up with songs that had from 6 to 10 tracks on them.

The songs are all stereo wma or wave files, so I can’t do any mixing on them, I can only do some mastering.

This is one of those songs. This has 2 acoustic guitars, electric bass and vocals. One acoustic guitar is in standard tuning, ......... the other is in dropped "D" tuning.

I was asked a question a few days ago by a fellow PG’er, that was a very good question indeed. It was, “Why don’t you record these songs over using BIAB, RealTracks and/or RealBand?”

At first, I took offense to this question. But contrary to my usual reactions, I paused and gave it some thought. At least 25 or 30 perfectly legitimate answers came to mind. (Okay, …………… maybe only 15 or 20!).

Fortunately for all of us, I’m only going to post two. The second is the most important.

1. For me, BIAB and the associated tools are for practice and/or backup. They’re easily the best tools I’ve came across in 40 years or so of playing, …… for any musician, regardless of style. And they keep getting better. I recommend them to every musician I have the opportunity to. But it’s not what I would use to record, at least for the instruments I play. I would rather record these instruments myself because that’s part of what makes the song “mine”. Also, a lot of these songs would be pretty hard to find a suitable style for. This is one of those songs.

2. Considering that I have a “backlog” of 40 or 50 songs I’ve written since then that I’d like to record, most of these old songs would be pretty far down the list of ones I’d work on whenever I do start recording again. I’m just trying to clean these up for “posterity” while I’m motivated to do so and I thought I’d post a few.

I’m not sure what to call this style, but here is “Village Dream”. Comments are welcome.

http://soundcloud.com/bobcflatpicke/village-dream

Bob
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http://soundcloud.com/bobcflatpicke/music-in-the-mountains