Being specific

The take-home message of the whole Escapades saga is clearly emerging as: Don't be a control freak.  It's paradoxical, but what it fundamentally took for this material to sound in reality the way it always had in my head, was for me to relinquish absolute control.  In particular, rhythm guitar parts are extemporaneous by nature, with the result that a real guitarist will almost invariably have a much better idea than me of what will best serve the song, even though they didn't write it!  My previous unwillingness to admit this reality presumably accounts for complaints expressed by some that the arrangements on Escapade/Escapade 2 sounded unfinished, besides being overly synthesized.

At the same time, though, if one does know exactly how a part should sound, it's better to write it out as such, rather than saying vaguely "Oh, this bit can be more expressive".  The bass in "Escapade" is a case in point.  Having already familiarized myself with Bruno's style by the time I prepared the score for this song (concurrently with "Modern Art" and "Them"), I was able to notate the expressive inflections in the two passages where the bass becomes a lead instrument, rather than just writing out the "main" notes and having the bassist guess.  The result probably ranks as my favourite performance of his in this entire project, and that's saying a lot!

Incidentally, the second of these "bass solo" sections (adapted from "My Next Escape") was executed with an acoustic guitar patch on both previous versions.  It goes down to C#2, though, so to play it on a real guitar would have required either down-tuning by 3 semitones (à la Black Sabbath) or using a baritone guitar, both of which struck me as excessive for a passage lasting only 4 bars out of the song's total of 155.  So I chose to make it a bass solo instead!  In a bit of outside-the-box thinking I'm rather proud of, I transferred the actual "bass line" in this passage to the bottom line of the string arrangement.

Escapologist for a day

I still have my flute.  I can still remember the fingerings for every note from C4 (it hasn't got a B footjoint, by the way) up to B6, including the alternate fingerings required to play high trills.  I haven't actually played it in years, but I'd expect the muscle memory of the embouchure to return to me pretty quickly if past experience is anything to go by.

What I don't have is the ideal microphone for recording such an instrument, nor the knowledge of where to place said microphone.  Thus I realized it was far more efficient, in every way, to bring in an extra player for the flute part in "Escapade", rather than playing it myself.  Enter Yuri Villar (via Musiversal).  His phrasing is certainly more refined than mine would be, which helps out in both relevant passages: the nearly ambient intro now takes on a slightly exotic character (hints of Toru Takemitsu, perhaps?) while the jazzy phrases in the "After the Party"-based section are just that!

Incidentally, I originally wrote the instrumental obbligato in "After the Party" with saxophone in mind, not flute.  I have a vague recollection that "Last Day", the song created at Dartington 2006 that inspired "After the Party", featured dramatic saxophone solos.  Whether that was the case or not, the baritone sax near the end of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Pts. I-V" was certainly then among my favourite moments in all of rock.  (It still is.)  Anyway, when it came to recording "After the Party" in its excruciating entirety for Escapade 2, I drew the line at trying to synthesize a saxophone, and didn't want to outsource anything for reasons already discussed, so I ended up making the lead instrument a (real, for once!) flute instead.

I did consider transferring the line back to saxophone for Chronicles, but felt that since another part of "Escapade" (the song) features the flute anyway, the piece would gel better if I didn't.

Healing tones for a healing song

In the autumn of 2019, I had a healing experience.

I don't know why I chose Pink Floyd's The Division Bell (1994), of all albums, to listen to during a long journey to a conference.  But I did.  Meanwhile, at one point while waiting for a bus, I got what felt like my 10000th glimpse of a young couple being, well, carefree and coupley.  Unbearable pangs of envious longing caused by this sort of thing had felt like a curse on my very existence since the events described in "Look and See" - this was also my starting point for the Chronicles iteration of "Them".  In this instance, though, the usual horrible feeling of inferiority simply did not happen!  This also happened to coincide with the brilliantly executed cross-fade of "Take It Back" into "Coming Back to Life"; the sublimely beautiful guitar intro to the latter song thus became the first music I heard as a free person.

I've always seen this as one face, not two.

Thus, even if it's admittedly not to everyone's taste, the achingly pure and sweet guitar tone on "Coming Back to Life" seemed an appropriate choice for the more tender moments of "Escapade" - itself a song about leaving despair behind.  These moments would be, roughly speaking, the beginning and end of the track.  Contrasting this, we have a pair of dramatic, distorted rock solos encasing the "After the Party" interpolation.  As I write this, I'm laughing a bit at the jarring contrast between that tone and the tinny MIDI clarinet that's a placeholder for the vocals!

Program with caution

The power of technology to suck the very life out of a piece of music (at least, one that relies heavily on its emotionally charged nature) should not be underestimated.  The drums in "Escapade" illustrate this starkly.  Replacing the programmed percussion with a human player already makes me far less inclined to lose focus while listening to the track in progress - despite the fact that, on the face of it, the parts are almost identical!  I suspect that the difference is only perceptible on a subconscious level, but this only serves to illustrate the power of the subconscious.

I do find it appropriate to be thinking about this in the context of an album whose central theme (to the extent that it has one) is the layered nature of the mind...

More thoughts on MIDI

Because there's so many instrumental layers to "Escapade" (the song), I'm taking a slightly different approach to producing it compared to the previous 6 tracks.  Rather than starting with just my keyboard parts and a few placeholder "guitars" and "basses", I've opted to start by programming all the parts, drums and all, and replace them one by one.  That way, I have a basic idea, right from the start, of where every instrument should be placed in the mix (in terms of gain and pan positions).

So as it stands, it doesn't sound very good!  In fact, it currently comes together as a shrill, expressionless, synthetic cacophony.  The fact that I don't at all enjoy hearing the song in this state, though, is probably a good thing, considering that my idea of a "polished studio sound", applied to my own music, conspicuously used to be exactly that.  Moreover, this has got me thinking more deeply about why I (seemingly) had such a tin ear for production back in the Escapade and Escapade 2 eras.

Like (I'm sure) many people, I found starting out as a composer extremely frustrating.  Time and time again, I'd hear my musical efforts played by real musicians only to be disappointed that it didn't sound at all like it had in my imagination.  It often seemed like I wasn't being taken altogether seriously, although admittedly trying to glorify my student exercises the way I did can't have helped my case.  MIDI, by contrast, cannot say "I'm afraid I can't do that", nor can it question my artistic vision.  Consequently, that shrill, expressionless cacophony of MIDI instruments became, for me, the sound of me being firmly in control of my music.  And so I grew to enjoy it.

Definitely not the case now!  I actually sometimes get a bit nauseous just thinking about the extraordinarily wimpy sound of Escapade.  Sadly this colours my perception of Chronicles of a Dead End a bit, too, particularly on "Days to Midnight", no doubt because that track follows the original arrangement relatively closely.  I find it hard to keep the Escapade and Chronicles versions of the song separate in my mind.

As for Escapade 2, I had become aware by then that the PSR-5700 sounded laughably dated to 2000s-10s ears (it's a 1992 model, by the way), but was still clinging fast to the mindset that the sterile "perfection" of MIDI (filtered through, let's face it, laziness) was a desirable aesthetic for my work.  So while Escapade sounds like it came from a place of extreme confusion (accurate), Escapade 2 just comes off as a massive strop.

One note made all the difference!

Fixing the intro to "Look and See" has provided the most startling illustration I've ever encountered of how in music production, a tiny change can be extremely significant.  The rewritten synth "lead" part now goes up a 6th to a high A-flat, instead of up a whole tone to the alien-sounding Lydian intrusion in previous versions.  (The Lydian mode is my favourite mode, but I'll admit it is challenging to use well.)  Having a bigger ascending interval there makes more sense anyway for another reason: it fits the yearning character of the song.

And with that, the stage is set for the grand finale.  The "Escapade" suite itself is all that remains.  And as of this week, we more or less have confirmation that the thing that required me to keep the piece's length under 8 minutes is going ahead.  More on that later!