Since Eleanor started this great series about the songwriting process (https://www.thewhisperingtree.com/blog/the-genesis-of-a-song-by-the-side-of-the-road), I decided to start an accompanying series about the arranging/recording part of the album making.

I find that very few artists talk about this part of the creation of an album, and I love when artists create inspired remixes of their tracks, or share technical aspects of what happened in the studio, and all the “behind the scenes” type of things.

So here we go, “By the Side of the Road – the making of” 🙂

As Eleanor mentioned in her post, we originally envisioned somewhat of a tribal feel for this song, with percussion and didgeridoo playing a drone the whole way through. However, due to production constraints (budget + time), we never got the chance to record it this way. We did have a percussion track that did not make it in the final mix. Here’s a snippet of the percussion track by itself and the same snippet of what the mix would be with the percussion in:

[wpaudio url=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/By The Side – percs sample.mp3″ dl=’0′ text=’Percussion Track’]

[wpaudio url=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/By The Side – mixdown + percs sample.mp3″ dl=’0′ text=’Mix with percussion’]

We decided that the the percussion didn’t sound like we wanted it to and that the mix was more interesting and less cluttered without them. However, nothing is lost, we bring you a video of our drummer Chris Schultz improvising on the track when we were experimenting with percs!

I really hope one day we’ll do another recording of the song with our original instrumentation idea (and for that I’ll have to find a didgeridoo in F#, which is really not easy to come by!)

In the mean time, while playing with the stems to write this post, I found that listening to the whole song with just the piano and the vocals had a really good feel about it. So just for you, those who made it to the end of this article, here’s a gift: a downloadable mp3 of “By the Side of the Road” with vocals and piano only (which sounds pretty awesome if you ask me!)

[wpaudio url=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/By The Side – Piano + Vocals only.mp3″ text=’By the Side of the Road – Vocal + Piano only’ dl=’0′]

Download link : By The Side – Piano + Vocals only.mp3

Enjoy!!!

Oh and here’s a video of me tracking the acoustic guitar. I think it looks cool so what better place to share it than this post?