i’ve wanted to change the intro to ‘king forever’ ever since i realized it will likely be the leadoff track. before i had this thing where it faded into a high electric chord and then kicked in to all instruments. the lead part has changed a lot; at one point the intro lead followed the melody of the chorus. then i pulled away from that and played this other part instead that was a little echoey but didn’t love it either.

so i’ve been thinking about it for awhile and finally worked out a new idea in my head. i wanted to start with a sort of driving clean electric part alone that fades in by itself first for about 4 bars. then two bars in i thought of adding a lower swell that i might accomplish with the ebow. then into all the instruments again, only this time the lead part is based more off of the verse melody instead of the chorus.

it took some doing, but it’s come together fairly nicely. the lead part sounded like butt first off, and i didn’t know why, but it was slightly out of tune and messed it up. (yes, i tune before recording. no, i don’t know what happened). once the tune was fixed i liked it. the ebow took several tries and it still swells rather sharply at one point but i think it works. i like the lead effect as well.

then i recorded the acoustic intro to ‘rise’ that i’d already figured out. i kept messing up different parts just slightly each time so it took many, many takes to get one to keep. odds are i’ll hear it tomorrow and think it needs to be redone (same with the other song…who knows) but it’s there.

i was planning on adding a complementary capoed rhythm acoustic part to ‘rise’ but when i tried it it didn’t work out like i thought…it was kind of too busy. then i tried moving the capo up a bunch further and tried to just pick as accents intead and that seemed to work much better. played around with it to come up with something then recorded it and mixed it below everything else. i think it adds the accent i was looking for and could well be all that’s needed for this one.so those two should be about ready for vocals, which is marvelous.

oh, and then there was one not so great discovery. when i wrote ‘give glory’ i had it in C; but the range gets pretty big between the verses and chorus. the verses were low so i liked them better in C but the prechorus and chorus were getting up there a good ways, so i had changed the song to B instead. well, long story short, i never really got it straight in my head which key i wanted it in (which is B) and when i did the bass part awhile back i did it in C. oops. dumb.

so after a brief look into pro tools LE’s pitch shifting capability — total crap — i’ll have to rerecord the bass. no big deal, but……dumb.