Billy McBolan - Session 5 - 3rd September 2012

Session times: 7:30pm-10:30pm

Strange Love - Mixing

All the recording had been done for this song on previous sessions, so we were planning to just get the mix right.  Although this song was originally planned to be sung by Dael, after the issues last week, it was decided that it would become a duet.  I'd sorted out the vocal tracks during the week, with Billy singing a couple of lines of the verse and then Dael singing the next couple and all of the choruses.  I had done a mix where both Billy and Dael sang the chorus together, but it didn't really work, so we just left it as Dael.

Since we first started recording this track, Billy had said he wanted an ethereal melody line at the beginning, sort of like the scary wailing sound you got in early horror movies.  I eventually worked out he meant a Theramin, but the virtual instrument I downloaded wasn't really the sound he wanted.  Billy was trying to come up with something for the introduction with piano chords and I suggested he just play the melody line, which I recorded as MIDI.  This meant we could play around with the sound without having to re-record the melody line each time.  He then mentioned again about the Theramin, so I had a fiddle around with a sine wave generator, and after some tweaks for vibrato and filtering, we came up with a sound that matched what was in Billy's head.  It is sort of hidden in the mix, but it's there if you listen carefully.

Billy outlined an idea he had about a video for this song, we had a good think and couldn't come up with any other video we'd seen that was similar.  I can't go into details of the idea (or I'd have to kill you etc), but it sounded quite interesting and fitted the mood of the song very well.

I burned a CD of the mix we had agreed on tonight and also gave him a CD I made last week which contained a take with just Dael singing, and also a proper duet (choruses and all) version.

All in all, recording this track went quite smoothly and Billy is very keen on coming back to the studio to record more songs in the future.