Remote Possibility - Canis Horribillis

The latest output of Remote Possibility, Canis Horribillis, started out as an early instrumental effort of the virtual band called "Ummmm," which has some trippy xylophone and percussion effects and a compelling, if innovatively tuned, guitar riff by Vincent Knobil. But the ever churning mind of Matt Love, aka IcePac, dreamt up some lyrics for the tune - kind of mixture of "Hell Hound on my Trail" and "Knick Knack Paddy Wack" - and shopped it around for contributors.

To make a long story short, in this particular version (others may be forthcoming), I "sing" the main vocals, using my best western drawl. I also played the drums. A woman calling herself Liza did a test recording which I used snippets of in the beginning. The stars of the show, however, in my opinion, are the saxophone tracks provided by Ryan Ray. He rips a crazy solo near the end of the tune followed by some wonderful vamping against the percussion at the very end.

Mixing the song was a challenge. I had to do a lot of tinkering to get everything synced up and find a reasonable balance. I experimented with synth effects and creative EQ but was never happy with anything that I tried so I ended up using little in the way of effects except adding some reverb and touch of compression on the drum track. I dinked around with adding a bass line but couldn't come up with anything that sounded decent or didn't muddy things up.

Walking the Crags

Here's a simple tune I call Walking the Crags. It started out, as usual, as an exploration of various chords on virtual piano where I came up with a back-and-forth triplets riff using E flat and A flat minor ninths. Per my MO, I used the chords to create a scale with interweaving clarinet and vibraphone solos. The drums are minimal but live, I played them straight through and there's no editing. It's pretty soft groove and I was going for a nice airy sound with the cymbals. The biggest challenge was to get the bass to sit right in the mix.

Technically, the new thing here is a stereo pan plugin I downloaded free. It offers more control than Logic's default panning knobs and allows you to get the various voices in a more focused position in the stereo field. Otherwise, there's nothing fancy going on here..