Welcome to prog...

"It's a bit of a long song," commented the vocalist during the recording session for "Faraway Island".  In fact the sections with vocals only account for 79 of the song's 211 bars (that comes to 3 minutes out of nearly 9) but it's true that the part somehow feels longer than that.  Its classical-like complexity also makes it challenging to sing, which is why I struggled so much with it in previous iterations, and also why I chose to bring in another vocalist this time.

Nonetheless, there are some beautiful moments in the end result.  Section "B" in particular soars to exactly the kind of heights that I might have ill-advisedly attempted to pull off myself on the original.  There's a very brief bit of harmony in a certain spot corresponding to where I added harmony in the (omitted this time) "B" reprise section in the Escapade version.

Before the vocals were recorded but after I sent the work in progress to our vocalist, though, I got the bass recorded and mixed in.  It turned out that a real electric bass guitar has a less penetrating timbre than the MIDI bass that I used as a placeholder, so I had to have the synthesizers a fraction quieter than before, allowing the bass to cut through the mix as more than just a background presence.  It's a very active bass part that needs to be heard and not merely felt, particularly in the "B" and "C" sections.

I did in fact end up having to use volume-envelope trickery on the acoustic guitar part.  It turned out that in the later "A" sections, having the guitar at full blast combined with all the other instruments piled in basically swamped the vocals.  I think what makes this such a difficult song to mix is the sheer diversity of its arrangement: it juxtaposes some of the densest textures and some of the sparsest ones in the entire set.

It's such a densely layered song, in fact, that its project file comes to a staggering 1.71GB of waveforms, and that's with one crucial part still missing.  That would be the lead guitar, which this time will (hopefully) include an improvised solo to enhance the "C" section's build-up as well as (revised versions of) the familiar written lines.