In June, I have produced and engineered two songs—for two completely different projects.
Sweet Poison with Vapour Sea
Vapour Sea is a collaboration project between me and Sudipto. While we waited for the guys in Dark Project to finish recording (and I wonder if it would ever be finished), Shounak pitched in a seed idea for a song. One thing led to another and in no time we had Korak—Dark Project’s earlier drummer—and Karran—an exchange student in IISc—on board.
We started tracking the parts in April, with the expectation that we would finish the song in a month. As expected, things did not go as planned. Shounak had to focus on finalising and submitting his Ph.D. thesis and Karran was stuck in Orissa with no working internet connection to share his tracked bass parts. Cyclone Fani can be blamed for the latter. We managed to resume the work by June. I took care of the mixing while Shounak and Karran took care of making a nice lyric video.
Blue Moon with Rueben
Working with Rueben is an yearly affair. In the last three years, we have managed to release exactly three songs—one of which was an instrumental cover.
Whenever I work with him, my aim is to rapidly come up with a working piece and finish it as fast as possible (like a sprint in an agile project)—or that’s what I have in my mind; I don’t know about Rueben.
I had a motif that we hinged on to write an instrumental. We build our parts around to come up with a three-minute song. It took us four-to-five hours to compose and track the parts—including our Chinese dinner consisting of burnt garlic noodles and pork fry—and another four-to-five hours to edit and mix the project. I am really happy with the low effort-to-outcome ratio.
My new obsession—perfect fourth (P4) tuning
In both the songs, I used my inexpensive copy of GS-Mini by Harley Benton. It’s tuned to P4, i.e., EADGCF. I tend to remember visual stuff better and visually P4 is a much better tuning for me to memorise patterns on the fingerboard. This limits my ability to play traditional open (or zombie) chords but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
There are very few established players who use this tuning. Shounak pointed out that Robert Fripp of King Crimson used this is (at least) in some of the recordings. I have myself come across Tom Quayle who uses this tuning.