"Island rhythms" doesn't usually mean a prog epic

You might well say that, but as it happens the kaleidoscopic coda of "Faraway Island" actually does call for some tribal-ish extemporization on the tom-toms and snare.  In the sheet music I prepared, I marked this passage "Think the 'Strawberry Fields Forever' coda but less sinister".

Not to my surprise, mixing in the drums revealed that the keyboards did indeed require more work.  I ended up replacing the vast majority of the programmed string parts with me playing them on the Jupiter-80 with a more mellow tone.  The only programmed parts I did leave in are three brief passages which I don't think I could play accurately enough.  In all three of these passages, there's plenty else going on anyway.

Interestingly, I also re-instated an element of the Escapade 2 version that I was previously sure I wouldn't.  That is, I felt that the transition out of the "C" section needed an extra element, and as an experiment I overlaid a repeat of the train station ambience from the intro there.  It works astonishingly well!

As the bass guitar part in the coda has the combination of being extremely simple (one note over and over) and requiring down-tuning, I opted to play it myself to save a bit of our professional bassist's time.  It did not save my time, though... tightening up my own sloppy timing in post-production probably ranks as the most tedious audio-editing job I've ever taken on.  Let's hope it's worth it.

Pulling out all the stops

Unless I'm forgetting something, every keyboard instrument I own has found its way into the in-progress mix of "Faraway Island".  The thing with synthesizers is that one often needs to layer multiple different tones for the mix to sound satisfying.  This proved a particular challenge in the brief passages of this song which are only keyboards - and I may well decide between now and the final mix that I still got the tone choices wrong.

In the case of the solo verse, this meant playing the part on the old Jupiter-80 and superimposing a pre-programmed string synthesizer playing the same notes!  If nothing else, this does promise to be a great moment and the pay-off that the "C" section always needed.  Can't be sure until the drums are in, and that's exactly what's (hopefully) coming next.