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.