Album 6 working title

This album started as an immediate response to Shaman of the Night. Partway into recording that record I found that two of SongCreator's build files had never made it into version control — the priorities that govern how far a phrase may reach across strings and frets, and a second file I have still not been able to name. I had to regenerate a temporary version of the first and record with it.

The songs it wrote were harder than they should have been. Track one of Shaman of the Night opened at 94.9% and averaged 86.6%; from track two on, the record averaged 69.2%, and reaching a 94% took a median of 4 plays. That is the difficulty you can hear on most of that album, and it is not the difficulty I asked for.

So I wrote this album's first four songs — Get Over Here, Give it Another Go, Just in Time and Always Welcome — and rebuilt SongCreator around them. The version modelled on those four is the one that wrote Shaman of the Night's last two tracks, Happy Place and Stay Forever, which is why that record ends easier than its middle: those two average 78.3%. After song four I changed SongCreator again, this time to write simpler. Tracks five to eight are the first songs from that version. The four before it average 69.7% and took a median of 5 plays to reach 94%; the four after average 73.7% and take 2.5.

The other thing I wanted back was tuning. From somewhere around track ten of Shaman of the Night the guitar was not properly intonated, and I let it go. On this album I recorded the first seven songs the same way before I checked: the E and B strings were six to eight cents sharp up the neck, past the five I will accept. So I set the intonation and recorded tracks one to seven again. That is Sep 27 on the timeline above, the busiest day of the record with 47 plays, and 7 of the 8 songs now stand at 100%. The D string I let sit five cents sharp through those seven; after the seventh I set it too, and you will hear that from track nine on.

I also want this record brighter than the last, and I want it to stay one guitar in one tuning for every song, the way Shaman of the Night was. The songs themselves are the bigger difference. Shaman of the Night was dark and mysterious: 11 scale families across twenty songs, among them Lydian, Phrygian, Dominant 7th, Roumanian Minor, Spanish Gypsy, Mixolydian. This one is daydreamy, and I mean to keep it that way for now: 6 of the 8 songs so far are Pentatonic Major.

8 songs so far, 12 still to record: a record that began as the fix for the one before it.