"Secrets"

This song was written late one night in 2001.  It was one of those moments where everything seemed to be aligned just right, the magic was in the air, or whatever happens when creativity peaks happens.  "Secrets" went from inspiration to completion in about 30 minutes, and the decision to make it the opening track on the next CD also came rather quickly.

Now that I am finally moving forward on preparing that CD, I revisited this song to see if it needed anything before being committed to the album.  Although the timing is a little sloppy in a couple of places and there is some unintended variation in the left-hand arpeggios, I decided to do absolutely no quantization or other "fixing," because a more intimate, human or perhaps "imperfect" condition is more true to the spirit of the song.    I had originally planned to extend the piece with a bridge leading into something as yet undetermined, but after listening to the initial draft I felt that this particular composition was certainly a case where one could easily break the spell by overdoing it.  The instrumentation is nothing fancy; little more than piano backed by strings, and so it seemed as though the basic structure of the song was appropriate as well.

I only made two significant changes (other than re-recording each track into the DAW at a higher sample rate).  First, I updated the piano sample from one on the ENSONIQ MR-61 to one from the KORG Triton.  I didn't yet own the KORG at the time this song was composed, and for most purposes I find its piano samples to be more lifelike.  Changing that patch did necessitate some level adjustments and effects processing in Reaper in order for it to properly fit into the mix.  After that, the only other change was a very small addition to the strings at about the 2-minute mark.  For some reason, every time I listened to this song I would hear - in my head - a specific note in the strings at that precise moment... that actually wasn't there.  So I put it there.