Great Escape reviews - Part 2

I'm pretty happy with how The Great Escape is faring on the GarageBand.com charts. It is currently sitting at #26, and has been as high as #24 out of 82 on the Progressive Rock channel. It has a current score of 4.3 (on a scale of 0 to 5).

This song has earned itself the following Reviewers' Picks awards:

Track of the Day on 1 Feb 2006 in Progressive Rock
Best Guitars in Progressive Rock, week of 30 Jan 2006
Best Production in Progressive Rock, week of 30 Jan 2006
Best Mood in Progressive Rock, week of 30 Jan 2006

Here are some more reviews.

From Iowa City, Iowa -

Nice relaxing mood. Almost like new age. I hear nice stuff going on. I don't hear a theme to grab onto, but that is ok as long as it remains interesting. So far it is. Nice guitar work. I'd like to hear something more to tie it all together. Maybe. Nicely done, though. Pleasing to the ear. You should have heard the song (loose term) before this one.

From Birmingham, West Midlands, United Kingdom -

the guitars are produced very intimately, apart from the electic solo guitar which is anything but subtle and doesnt and seem to sit well in the mix - needs more reverb id say. great harmony all the way through. i really dig this track, reminds me of marillion. also, moving and vibrant percussion drives the track along.

From Boise, Idaho -

This is a very pretty instrumental tune with some very nice guitar playing.

It kind of reminds me slightly of The Flower Kings and for some reason a little bit of Bon Jovi.

It almost has a western cowboy feel to it.

There's alot of lead guitar playing as the song builds.. maybe a tad too much for my tastes... but it's not bad.

From Tooting, London, United Kingdom -

Nice mix and subtle percussion. Wasn't sure about the really processed distorted guitar patch that snaked in over the top. Everything else sounds so nice and organic that it seemed rather out of place...maybe get a nice tube amplifier...(if this is a tube amplifier I apologise). Ebbs and swells are pleasant. By 1.07, the drummer is my favorite musician. It's 1.33 now, and my only gripe really is the guitar tone - sounds like an ugly cheap little pedal, wheras everything else is really lush and natural sounding. Keep everything else, bass, bells, cymbals, acoustic geetar - just find a nicer distorted guitar tone. Good luck!

From Toronto, Ontario -

Nice chord changes. Got me interested from the first bar. Liked the strings. Reminds me of Metallica's Unforgiven. Has a bit of a western vibe to it. Very Enio Morricone. Great percussion. Nice crescendo towards the end. Needs a bit more of a lead. Electric guitar solo sounded off in places towards the end; too much going on at the end, but maybe that's whatyou were going for. Cool. I'll check out more of your stuff.

Great Escape reviews - Part 1

Here are some of the reviews that I've received on GarageBand.com for my song The Great Escape, and my thoughts.

From Chicago, Illinois -

This has an interesting and unique feel to it. The percussion sounds good down the middle with the acoustic tracks panned around it. A couple minor performance flaws but well conceived and performed well overall. Shows some good musicianship and originality. I would have liked to hear more and see where else it could have gone.

Nice comments, and I feel encouraged by them. As far as where the song could have gone - it went were it went, and if it had gone anywhere else it would have not have been The Great Escape but a different song.

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -

OK it seems very strange to be rating this song in this genre when there is no lead vocal, and so much depends on that. I like the fact that you treat your guitars as lead instruments though, and I like how they work off each other. The bongos are sort of bothering me- they seem out of place or they are mixed too high. When it kicks in around 1:50 or so that is very cool. I have to say this sounds like a soundtrack more than a stand-alone song- a tune I could compare this to is Alice in Chains "whale & wasp"- which treats the guitars like you guys do- but check that tune out, because alot happens in a couple minutes.

I am glad that this reviewer picked up on how we used guitars as lead instruments - that was completely intentional and it is nice when listeners pick up on what we were trying to do with the song. I really like how the guitars play off each other as well; I am glad that this reviewer picked up on that.

From Dallas, Texas -

the intro is a bit weird. It sound like some of the sounds are meshing. Maybe try some compression on the bass. there are some nice melodies here. very somber.

The intro may sound weird because there is actually no intro. I did not write this song to any particular form; when I originally wrote it I couldn't think of an intro, so I asked myself why not write a song without an intro? Of all the songs I've written, this one in particular said to me that if I was going to experiment by writing a song without an intro, this was the song to try it on. The vocal version of this song also has no intro - the vocals come in immediately.

The Rolling Stones did a song called Ruby Tuesdays which also has no intro.

From New Haven, Connecticut -

I enjoyed this very much, the overall fell of the song is mellow and very earthy with a nice slight change in tempo at about 1;20 that works realy well. I really enjoyed the use of percussion as to drum set on this, it helps keep the fell real and not over stated. The guitar work was nice and consistent throughout and compliments the organ very nicely in the final 30 seconds of the song. Good mix, good production value and a good song, I can't find anything bad to say about this one.

I totally, totally like this review!

The Great Escape - reviews are coming in

The reviews for The Great Escape have started coming in, and so far they have been pretty good. As of today, it's ranking is #31 of 80 in the Progressive Rock genre - I'd say that is a significantly better ranking than I had with Yesterday Seems So Far Away last September (Yesterday has a current all time ranking of #1,624).

I am pretty excited about the results I am seeing so far.

Submitted The Great Escape to GarageBand.com

I finally did it - I submitted The Great Escape to GarageBand.com. I have been planning to do this since around October (see GarageBand.com - next step), and I've been actively working on preparing a track for submission since December (see Holding back vs taking action).

Although I had considered retitling the instrumental version of this song, I ended up deciding to keep the name The Great Escape - I've decided not to second-guess myself, and my reviewers will say whatever they say.

When I submitted Yesterday Seems So Far Away last September, that song ranked in the bottom three of its peer group. I will consider it a success if The Great Escape attains a significantly higher ranking.

So I guess I'll sit back for a while and wait for the reviews to come in and plan how I'm going to approach my next recording project.

My birthday presents

I got my birthday presents last weekend. Why so late, three months after my birthday? Well, my sister had given me a gift certificate to use at Chapters, and J had given me a gift certificate to use at Blockbusters. Both gift certificates have been sitting on my dresser since then, until I decided that they had sat there long enough.

I used the Blockbusters card to get the Star Wars Episode III DVD. I used the Chapters card to get a book called The Artist's Way.

Thanks, J, for the Star Wars DVD. Thanks sis, for the book.

Should I change the name?

I once said that when it comes to titling an abstract photograph, you can call it anything you want, because it's abstract - who's going to argue with your title? I titled one of my photos something like Ice Cream Dripping on a Sidewalk on a Hot Summer Afternoon - just because I could.

I figure the same reasoning could apply to a song that is instrumental - right? I've been debating whether I should rename The Great Escape when I post the instrumental version. In the lyrical version of my song, Great Escape refers to an escape from a dreary life running in the rat race where it's a drag just getting out of bed, to a life of passion and adventure with every day bringing so many possibilities.

However, I wonder if the title is a bit of a cliche. This title is shared by the classic 1963 movie (which I haven't seen yet) about an escape from a German POW camp. The band Marillion also did a song with the same name on their 1994 CD Brave. Is this title already overused?

Alternate titles I've considered for the instrumental version are Evolution and Metamorph. The way the three sections of the song build towards the climactic ending make me think of the metamorphosis from larva to pupa to butterfly.

Probably I'm second guessing myself and should just stick with my original title though.

Great Escape - alternate mix

The idea to do an alternate mix came from all those times I spent in the studio during mixing sessions on past recording projects, listening as SS would solo various combinations of recorded audio tracks in order to set their relative levels. He would mute this track and solo that track, and each combination would give the song a different feel and different character. I pondered that we could use the same source recordings to create a totally different mix of the same song just by emphasizing a different combination.

I thought we could try this on The Great Escape. I didn't have anything specific in mind for an alternate mix; I simply thought let's try this. I discussed this with SS and he suggested that we try an alternate approach to the percussion. The mix we made in December used a standard tom kit (sampled); this time he wanted to try it with an ethnic style percussion.

So we built a new set of percussion tracks and then mixed it with all the guitar work we recorded in December - and the idea worked. I had thought that with an alternate mix, I'd end up with a two different flavours of the same song; instead we ended up with an improved version of the song.

We still need to do a final mixdown and master the track, and then I'll be ready to post it to GarageBand.com.

Learning to extract video

My LifeDrive came with a bonus CD that contains an application called Pocket DVD Studio. This application is for converting DVD movies to be played on a Palm device. The file it creates is an AVI file - which can be used in a ShowBiz project. ShowBiz is the application I use to edit my video projects.

What all of this means is that I will be able to create videos that incorporate scenes from movies. That could open the door for new levels of creativity in future video projects.