Kicking Up Cinders - Stranger Demo

Kerouac

weird musical dildo


If you've seen us playing it on YouTube before, this version is a little different. We're getting ready to record an EP and trying some different things, so let us know what you like or don't like, aside from obvious things like being slightly flat on harmonies. :facepalm:


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well, she's up, so I tried to give it a go, only to discover that apparently, my speakers no longer work. :mad:
 
problem fixed (seems I hit mute last night...which is odd, since it requires a few clicks to get there)
checking it now
 
Not sure it's all the backing harmony's fault - she has an ... idosyncratic ... sense of pitch. It gives her a different sound, but it's tough to harmonize to a pitch center that shifts over the course of a phrase. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater but the vocal lines need to be consistently closer to each other for the harmony thing to work, so she could make it easier to follow by staying in concert pitch more of the time, and you could match her better by focusing in on when the pitch center is shifting in the main line.

You guys have way too many single notes going on in the guitars. Again, the lead finger picked acoustic isn't necessarily making things easy for the accompanist, but that is an important part of the sound so you have to figure out a way to work with it. Pick your spots for the single note runs, add dynamic and textural interest by playing more partial chords and spend a non-trivial amount of the song NOT PLAYING ANYTHING AT ALL.
 
Love it...

And I agree with what Rsadasiv said about the harmonies. She bends notes vocally all over the place and anticipating that kind of thing takes years of working together to figure out. The dynamics could be shifted a bit by some full chords strumming in spots - maybe at the beginning of the last chorus.

But I really like the direction you are heading in.
 
I probably should have added that it sounds good and you guys have made a lot of progress already.
 
It sounds pretty good. The David Rawlings role in these settings is really to make the whole song hang together--adding the harmony voice sets off the chorus a little bit, but the song would benefit from even more "choreography" in the second guitar part. Aside from what's been mentioned, I think some sparse, recurring rhythm guitar riffs would help tie the song up.

The pitfall that's very common in this genre is that you're performing some mutation of a traditional style, but you're still playing pop songs. So the samey-ness that works in trad music (often because it's dance-, worship- story-, or message-oriented) becomes a liability when paired with verse-chorus-bridge songwriting.
 
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