Recording the entire kit to a single track in an open room with other instruments has been a major headache, now 40 years later. I won't go into everything I tried, including reaching out to Lonnie to see if he would be willing to re-record them on my kit. He wasn't really interested and proved difficult to respond to my infrequent communication, so I gave up on the idea.

I was determined to try to use the original track and stumbled on a free trial of a software called RipX DAW. These folks claim to use AI to be able to separate digital audio into individual "stems," i.e, drums, bass, guitars vocals, all to separate output files. I originally thought to use it on those poorly captured "last three," at which it failed miserably to isolate anything usable. However, I decided to try it on the individual drum track and was amazed at how it was able to almost completely suppress the bass and guitar bleed into that track. It did a nice job on the bass track, too. The price for this software was out of my budgetary constraints, but they offered a 20-day fully functional trial, so I went through the drum and bass tracks of every take of every song that I had ripped from the original tapes back in 2014 before the trial expired.

All good and well, but the drums, particularly the kick, still sounded like Lonnie was beating on empty shoe boxes. Thanks to being on the mailing list of every audio plugin vendor on the planet, I got an email from Steven Slate Drums touting a deal on a product called Trigger 2. This plugin was designed to process drums recorded to individual tracks, and either directly replace them with some high-quality samples or you could mix the samples in with your original recording. Unfortunately it can't separate out individual drums from a composite track like we had, but I went back to something I tried back in '14--I made a duplicate copy of the drums track and applied a "brick-wall," low pass EQ at around 80Hz, effectively isolating the kick drum, and running it through Trigger 2. Trigger 2 is also capable of generating MIDI data from its processing, so I created a MIDI track of just the kick capture.

With Guinevere I went through every transient of the drum track and manually MIDI-programmed the kick, snare, and toms--TEDIOUS!!! And not always accurately in sync with the original track. My drummer buddy, Bruce, said it sounded like there were some slap-back echoes at times on the kit, as I had mixed the original kit with the MIDI-triggered samples.

I used the Trigger-2-generated MIDI track to feed a drum virtual instrument plugin (VSTI) called BFD Player, a freebie that comes with a limited set of sampled kits. I have several drums VSTIs, but I found a kick sample I liked in BFD Player, so I went with it. It still took some EQ, compression, and transient shaping to get the original kit track and the BFD Player track to work together, but what you hear is basically the original drum track with a MIDI-sampled, enhanced kick. I abandoned any attempt to give the toms some stereo spread, but the entire kit is running though a "stereo-izer" plugin to give it some width. My final word on all of this is how nice it was to mix the drums without fighting the bass and guitar bleed!

As previously mentioned, I'm on the mailing list of every audio tool vendor on the planet, one of which is a company called, Cymatics. This is a small outfit that primarily sells sample and MIDI collections, mostly in the Hip-Hop and EDM genres, but also a lot of what they characterize as "cinematics." They also sell some plugins (I used their transient-shaper/saturation plug, "Diablo," on the drums to make them "punchier"), but they also offer a ton of freebies, of which I always take advantage to download--I also have a freebie sample manager from a company called ADSR, which allows me to categorize and search the gigbytes of loops, samples and sound FX I've collected over the years. You'll hear some of the Cymatics stuff in the intro, like the building violins and the "riser" into my opening guitar work. Of course there are chirping bird sound FX, too, and I actually thought about trying to make sure that they were recordings of an actual bluebird, but I like what I found, so I'm sticking with it. You'll also hear an acoustic piano melody behind that guitar intro before the vocals.

I had always imagined the break after my guitar solo to be long and spacey before Lonnie's machine-gun snare part leading back into Charlie's solo, so I edited it as such. Again, some Cymatics stuff, lots of echo & reverb. Charlie's original whammy-bar dive has been stretched out, time-wise, and I created a loop of my guitar intro to play thoughout the break, along with a loop of a sample of Lonnie's closed hat. Finally, pièce de résistance, I added some Pink-Floyd voices behind it all. One voice is yours, from the intro vocals, "he couldn't see..." and "...past his face." Which I felt appropriate, given the edits from a telephone-tirade voice mail I received from Charlie last November, pieces of which I placed into the break.

In his message, he implied that I (rather my left brain, as it were) was responsible for him not becoming the rock star he apparently envisions himself, going back to an old trope he's pulled on me before. He claimed that I was a left-brain, and you were a right-brain and that I "couldn't keep my shit together," resulting in the ultimate demise of JD. He seems to forget some key points in his brain physiology "expertise" and his involvement in the events that took place. For one, I put the music and arrangement to 13 of our 15 song repertoire, writing several of them completely. This seems to me to be a creative endeavor more likely to eminate from one's right brain, but no brain physiologist am I. His one original wasn't even completely original, but an Andalusion Cadence chord progression used by the likes of Led Zeppelin and countless other blues & blues-rock artists over the years. And the final debate, Charlie threatened to quit the band if we didn't start doing covers and working more often to make money. You were the immoveable force in opposition to this direction for the band. It seems to me that he couldn't keep his shit together. Yes I backed him, foolishly, because I thought we worked well together as guitarists; he was a good singer; working more would have infused a tighter and possibly more polished performance overall; and he brought some much-needed music theory to the mix. After what he did to Aspex I should have just waved goodbye (and maybe called Paul Reed Smith back? LOL). And what exactly did he do to try to keep the band from falling apart? Yes, JD was a missed opportunity destroyed mostly by control issues (just like Aspex), but it goes much deeper than that. Over the years Charlie has ridiculed and harrassed me over such stupidity as my dislike for his "heroes" (e.g., the White Stripes and Elvis Costello) and another of his moronic tropes, my liking of Kansas and Styx. I'll never understand how my personal OPINION caused such existential harm & damage to his life as to cause actual anger at me. But I digress.

So you'll hear his "left-brain" and "right-brain" stupidity (whimsically out of the opposites in the stereo field, LOL), his "couldn't keep your shit together" (bookended by the "couldn't see past his face" lyrics from the intro), and his final profundity before he hung up, "life gets in the way."

So, another Mini Moog solo. I'm torn about being a one-trick-pony with this instrument (I probably have around 50 different virtual keyboard instruments, but I love the sound of this thing). I learned some more control capability like pitch-bend up and down, and in general I really like the solo itself, especially the way it transitions into my guitar solo. Kit Watkins, eat your heart out, LOL!

Once again, some Melodyne editing to spice up some of the notes in all three of the solos.

For the "Rush chords" after the intro, I ran both guitars through an amp simulator called Guitar Rig 7 Pro, to add a little Alex Lifeson tone (LOL).

Oh, yeah, I added a B3 keyboard, chording behind my guitar solo, and pulled Charlie's rhythm guitar out of that section.

And again, some Melodyne editing in the chorus backing vocals. In the intro & verse lead vocals I meticulously went through your phrasing to activate (send to) a couple of different delays, one short, one long. I also made sure that the delay feedback did not step on subsequent vocals or song parts by using automation to switch the plugins off and on. Automation was also employed to bounce the delays across the stereo field during the "sinner" and "travel to your heart first" lines.