This was one of those songs that must be constantly brewing in the subconscious, as I had a dream where someone was playing it. I woke up thinking that the song was beautiful, and quickly wrote it down and made up the music while I was still half asleep. Obviously, it’s the story of a woman who’s partner has problems, but she keeps saying “I’ll love him”, never forgetting the vows they took together. This is still a hard one to play live, as the message chokes me up every time I hear it. There’s hardly any better example to me of the fact that I’m not really the songwriter, but more like a vessel, when a tune like this one waltzes into my slumber. I couldn’t write a song this good if I tried.
This song is available on my latest album “Hope” for only $5, with all proceeds being donated to the Canadian Cancer Society. To get a copy, click here (http://www.dickmacinnis.com/hope.html).
I like it man. It’s pretty “honest” music. Could you please say more about how you made it?
For instance, all instruments sound “real”. Or is there any MIDI in it?
No midi. I recorded the guitars (two tracks of an Epiphone EJ-200), the harmonica, and the vocals all with a Samson C03U USB condenser mic, and I honestly can’t even remember how we did the drums.
I dug out some old drum tracks from a project that never came to fruition, cut and pasted the crap out of them, tempo matched them, and then used the new rhythm ferret in Ardour3 to quantize them. I do know that it was a Pearl target series with the stock brass (which sucks), and we miked the kick, snare, hi-hat, ride, and each of the three toms
The bass was recorded direct, and was a Yamaha something or other that I borrowed from a friend.
I used the CAPS 7 band eq on all the tracks, SC4 compressor on most, and ran them all into four busses each with another CAPS eq, TAP tubewarmth, and SC4 compressor. Then all the busses went into the master with the same plugins as the busses, but with an additional linuxDSP multiband compressor, linuxDSP channel eq, and a hard limiter at the end. Basically I made my own “Mixbus” with free plugins (apart from the linuxdsp plugs, which were more for mastering than mixing, as I didn’t add them until the mix was done). Other than that, I used two TAP reverberators each on their own bus for long and short reverbs, and Barry’s Satan Maximiser on some of the drums for punch.
