Colours - Part Three

The next song on the set is one that took a long while to complete, mainly because of drums.  The initial guide for The Little Man was me playing guitar and singing to a click track, to which I added a second acoustic guitar and a bass guitar.  I also added electric guitar, which included an amazing solo (from me damn it), organ, maracas, and the first set of drums by me.

After a long while, Ellie replaced the drums, mainly because of the middle eight.  After a while though, I was still unhappy with the drums, again because of the middle eight.  When Mark 'Mario' Smith said he could come in, I got the song ready and played it to him without the drums, and he said he knew what to do.  I think it just took him two or three runs through to get the final drums.  After a couple of looks into the middle eight anyway.  Another problem was the occasional bars of 2/4 that I had thrown into the song.

In fact, come to mention it, me and Joff had been working on a different version of the song.  We thought that we could do a decent slow dance track to it, which is now track 14 or something I think.  We basically rewrote the chords to make it less busy (for dance music purposes it was easier that way), and we programmed a decent rhythm and lush keyboards.  To this I put my bass through an effects system I had, and put down the gorgeous bass part.

Joff then took all of this with him and absolutely surprised me when at a later session he turned up to engineer and played me the gorgeous guitar parts he had put down.  After that he put down the acoustic guitar.

After Mario's drums were placed onto the other version though, the dance version was still too good to forget, so it has a sort of bonus track position.  I like both versions, though I have a preference for the dance version.

Another thing I almost forgot was the fantastic vocal effect.  For this song we used a technique that we called reverse reverb.  That description sort of explains it, but to explain it fully we took the vocal part, played it backwards, and added reverb (echo) to it.  After this we put the vocal back into the right place, which meant that the echo was before the vocal and not after, a great effect in my opinion.  For information, the first instance of it being used I believe was on The Beatles song I'm Only Sleeping, which I didn't realise when I first used it.

Next up is Here I Am, which is a decent song, but wasted in a way.  Firstly it was recorded live for the guide with me on vocal and acoustic guitar, Ellie on drums, and Jim Annison on bass.  At a later date I came up with a guitar run which I tracked a lot, and there was a problem with the original bass fading in and out for some reason, so it had to be re-recorded.  For time purposes I did it myself, and this time I had the bass joining in with the guitar run, which was a big mistake, because I think looking back on it I feel as though it would have been better to have had a relatively basic root note and fifth bass line just to keep a steady rhythm going.

I re-recorded the original strummed acoustic guitar because of John now doing the lead vocal.  I also added tin whistles (double tracked) and harmonica.  John put on some keyboard flutes to add to my tin whistle parts.  The vocals are something that have bothered me ever since though.  John's lead vocal is fine, but when I added my chorus lead vocal I harmonised one of his lines at one point, and I think that I should have kept doing that because it works so well.  There was also another refrain that forgot to put at the end of the song, which I should have put down as intended - Ellie singing it.

Hypocrites is a song recorded during the A New World Order sessions.  I thought that a live and rough tune would work nicely with all the production everywhere else on Colours.  Not a bad song, but it wouldn't win an Ivor Novello.

Don't Run Away is a decent song, although an harmonica that's in key would have been better - doh!  I thought the non-vocal chord changes between the verses and choruses were very Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers at the time (thinking of the verse to chorus change in Into The Great Wide Open and that sort of thing), and I think that they worked incredibly well.

Synchronise is an interval sort of thing.  Basically it's a rhythm programmed by John I think, with keyboards by me and John, samples of water drops, my effected bass doing a sort of melody, and completed by Ellie's vocal pinched from Wreath.  A nice little interval I think.

Last on the set is One By One.  I was going to do it as a fully electric rocked-out song, but someone thought it would be more interesting to leave it acoustic as I had written it (as I do most of the songs I write).  So it was me (acoustic guitar) and Ellie (drums) for the guide, and then I added bass.  I was gigging with a Project Marv band at this time and Andy Dobb (who was playing guitar and singing live) suggested a different guitar figure to play at the same time as mine in the middle eights, which was a different octave pattern.  Basically, the next session for Colours, I went in and played exactly what Andy had been playing live, and I also put down the solo's.  Unfortunately I couldn't get Andy to sing the song for the recording, because his voice worked perfectly for the song live.  The vocal take was distorted extremely to give it a nice effect as well.

There we are, finally my opinion of the songs on Colours.  A good set, spoilt in places, but with some gems.

Thank you for reading, please take care.

30 May 2011 (40 years, 6 months, and 4 days old)