Continuing from what I wrote previously about a 'proto-song': last Saturday I sequenced a bare bones version of the 'proto-song'. The accompaniment was block chords played on strings along with bass, piano and drums. When I moved this over to Reason in order to hear what the song might sound like, I found a new (for me) strings patch that made a huge difference: this sounded like a string quartet playing in front of me, as opposed to an echo-drenched string section pad. This gave me the idea to create a quasi-orchestral arrangement.
On the basis of this patch, I dropped the piano and drums and converted the bass part into a bowed cello part. As usual, serendipity plays a part: the day before, I had been listening to a discussion of Debussy's "Passepied" that features arpeggios and so I decided that I would add arpeggios to the arrangement of my new tune. At first, these were assigned to pizzicato strings, but I didn't like the sound of this so I replaced the pizzicato with a harp. Whilst thinking about the sort of chromatic runs that are often played on the harp, I remembered that one favourite piece of mine is Ravel's "Introduction and Allegro" that features a harp; I also have a midi file of this. Reading about the harp, I learned that runs are totally diatonic (i.e. notes in the scale), not chromatic. I took a look at the harp part but decided that it was either too dense or not appropriate for my requirements, although I did take a single arpeggio (that seems to play a Bb minor chord) and reduced it to one 'up' and one 'down' per bar.
Probably a day later I introduced some syncopation to the harp part by delaying one note: now it sounds like a tango! For the circle of fifths part I had a viola playing notes, but after a few days I decided to replace this with an English horn; contrasting this is a bassoon playing some lead lines. I reduced the amount that the string quartet was playing, replacing it in the instrumental coda with pizzicato strings that made their return. Several other changes were made as I worked on this song all last week. By Saturday I thought that I had a complete and finalised arrangement, although of course I was deluding myself. I also felt that I had worked much harder on this arrangement, considering how few instruments are playing.
On Saturday morning I wrote the words that so far have barely been revised (maybe they don't need revision after the initial arguments with myself about what words and rhymes to use). There are three verses to the song (no break in the middle but a relatively long instrumental coda) and the verse itself can be considered to be made of three parts. As I was writing the words, I viewed the third part of each verse to be chorus-like, in that each verse has almost the same lyrics for this part. In the final verse, I felt that the message (as such) needed more emphasis, so I wrote another 'chorus'. This of course required me to go back to the arrangement and add the necessary eight bars, although this also demanded a chord change in one bar. The instrumentation also changed at this point: in order to emphasise the words, I wrote a very simple choir part that maintains the chordal structure without drawing attention to itself.
On Saturday evening I made my first attempts at recording my vocals. I noted that I had difficulty in pitching the first notes of the chorus - this is an A note over a Gm chord, the ninth - and if I missed this then the rest of the chorus got lost. Eventually I sorted this out and I now have a complete version of the song. I am, however, going to rerecord the vocals as what I have so far sounds very tentative and insufficiently confident, which is not too surprising. I'm not sure about the tempo: at the moment it's 96 bpm, making the entire song with intro and coda 5:24 minutes long. I may increase the tempo and thus shorten the length slightly.
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