Pressure Cooking
I was under some pressure this weekend: I had to finish the arrangement for More by Sunday night, so I could send the work-in-progress mix to Ruben, who will redo some of the guitar work this week and then ping that back to me just in time for the final mix, next weekend. Yay for looming deadlines…
Arranging is a bit like cooking. You toss a few ingredients in a bowl, give it a good stir and then you have a taste. Maybe it needs another pinch of salt or perhaps a dash of pepper. You throw in your spice of choice and taste again. Repeat until you have it tasting just right. The big difference is that with an arrangement, you can also take things out again without having to start over.
I’ve spent much of the weekend trying out different spices to complement my little dish - from tiny tinker bells to massive string sections, from screeching saxophones to roaring guitars. In the end, I settled for just a few more bleeps and blops from the ever reliable Jupiter-8 (one of these days, I’ll have to buy a real one). Apparently, that was all I needed to keep the momentum of the song going forward (read: to keep you, the listener, from being bored with the song half way through).
In the week ahead, I will be polishing the mix and working out a little side project I have going on. I expect to be extremely busy, so my apologies if there are no further updates until Sunday.
