Stepping Stone 2014

Posted on Feb 14, 2014 in Acoustic, All Recordings, Demo, Single Take

There is so much I can say about this song. I wrote it 10 years ago in a different key and it was a significant departure from my usual writing style and ushered in a period of musical experimentation. Around this time period I wrote a number of different sounding pieces, including the Blue Juice sessions, and was trying to discover a new sound.

Try as I might, I cannot consistently sing this song well in the original key it was written in. The low notes are a big strain on my vocal chords and a lot of the time I miss the intended notes. The higher parts never had a distinctive melody and I just sort of rushed and slurred through them. I was never quite happy with how it came off when I performed it. Initially I thought that repeated practice might bring it around, but it never did, despite gaining some popularity, so I let it sit for half a decade mostly unplayed because it was too hard on my voice and I never felt I was performing it the way it should be done.

Over the past year I have been digging up some of my older work and playing around with it, polishing arrangements changing keys around, and working with new vocal techniques.
This one has recently received some treatment and I want to make a proper multitrack demo of it soon – so I have been practicing a revised version of it.
I have some other new ideas for this song, but I have been pretty happy with the direction it has been moving in. Here is a little rough one-take demo I played to test some new features of my audio rig.

Bear in mind that this is a one-take recording that was intended to capture some of the in-progress changes to the song and to test some new microphone setup and permutations. I’m still satisfied that it shows an improved level of capability from the original version from ten years ago, and it is more like what I had in mind when I came up with it.
I thought I’d share it. Stay tuned for a more fleshed out version in the coming months!