After the collaboration on our last song, Kate quickly came up with another idea based on the characters in the novel she is working on. You can read her take on the song here.

One challenge this time is that I needed to sing it — which as I’ve talked about before, isn’t something that I’m completely comfortable with yet. To make it even more challenging, the song is pretty much at the bottom of my range. I could have transposed it to a higher key, but I also wanted to keep the high octave doubling on the last chorus. I recorded about 5 different vocal takes and then kept the best bits from each. I’m not 100% thrilled with the vocal performance, but I think that I’ll always be extremely self critical when it comes to singing. Kate assures me it sounds fine (she might have even said it was good, I was too busy being critical to know for sure).

The overall arrangement came together pretty quickly — I worked out the chord structure on the piano, and everything else fell into place from there.

Recording and mixing took much longer than I hoped, mainly because of the singing, but also because there are more tracks overall than I’ve worked with before. It’s a relatively simple arrangement, but I still wound up with 20 tracks.

Recording notes

Once again, everything here was done on the iPad.

• The piano sound is from Sampletank.
• Bass was recorded direct into the iPad and processed through JamUp
• The lead vocal was processed using ToneStack - mostly for compression and reverb.
• Several tracks were sent to AUFX:Space for reverb and AUFX:Dub for a timed delay effect.
• Percussion was all created using Impaktor, which is an amazing drum synth app that uses sound from the iPad’s microphone as a trigger. So I created each looped part by tapping on the table next to the iPad, then layered them together.
• There’s a very quiet ukulele part in the bridge that was heavily processed using ToneStack. I probably should have taken it out completely, but it does add a little color.
• All tracking and mixing was done in Cubasis and some final mastering was done in Final Touch.