One of the very cool things about working with Sam is his willingness to try anything, and then be happy to completely throw it out if he feels it doesn’t work. This was the case for the horn parts for Poverty Blues. I thought they worked great, but Sam has decided to take the track on a different vibe. He now wants the song to be a sonic “sitting around the campfire” kind of track. Clearly brass instruments and campfires don’t match. So out they went.
Sam provided me with an old reference of the song, and so much of this week was spent “de-polishing” the track:
- All reverbs – gone
- All delays – gone
- Most doubled guitars – gone
- Djembe – louder
- Stompbox – louder
- Vocal – louder, dryer, grittier. For this I used my “favourite plug-in of the moment”. It’s part of Native Instruments Reaktor and it’s called “Fat Blaster”. It’s an awesome multi-band compressor.
I’m using this on lots of things these days. Vocals, bass, drums, and more vocals. I love it because in a way it acts like an EQ as well, so I have often found myself using the “gain” controls of each band to create tonal variations. This is Fat Blaster 2. There’s an earlier version but I think this one is better.
We were also supposed to be doing BV’s on this track this week, with my good friend Katie Carr. But alas the two sessions we organised got cancelled.
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