Some songs are never done

The new Reaper mix of "Dear Friend" is currently at 23 tracks

Quite a few of the songs I create sit in a state of partial completion for months or even years before I will go back and finish them. "Dear Friend" is an exception as it was brought out to its full length only a few days after the first note was written, and has been sitting on the shelf for the last eight years.

However, as I began working on the next album, I decided to re-record as many of my already completed songs as I could at a higher sample rate and, if possible, update some of the sounds and recreate the mix in Reaper instead of SAWPro. 

When I tackled this song I found that I had all of the original MIDI tracks, but I was unable to exactly duplicate the mix for the ending that I had made for the original version in SAWPro, so I had to come up with a new ending. In the years since I originally finished the song, I had made a lighter piano-based version for use in massage therapy. Just for kicks, I inserted the opening to that version as a new ending for this version, and found that it actually worked very well. In the process of doing that, I came up with a few new ideas, and those ideas spawned other ideas, and now I have ended up nearly completely redoing the mix. The picture here shows the mix as it is now in Reaper - 23 tracks at the moment.


You can hear the original mix of "Dear Friend" on my MySpace page.  The new mix will be on the next album.