I bought a ‘Vintage Dry’ kit expansion pack for my Addictive Drums virtual instrument plugin and the sounds reminded me so much of the kit sounds and those slow drum fills of the mid 60s that I wrote this Beatles/Traffic psychedelia pastiche.  I wanted to evoke that warm English summer of 1967 when I was a budding 19 year old guitarist and the air was filled with not only the heady scent of flowers but also the imagery of Lewis Carroll, paradoxes, playing cards, mysticism, hidden meanings, mazes, kaleidoscopes, altered states and all things mystical and esoteric.

I used PG Music’s Band In A Box to give me piano, strings, bass and rhythm guitar parts over my deliberately odd chord progression, and a flutes patch on my Roland Fantom X6 made for a nice Mellotron impersonation using the same piano part.

Technical notes:

I used Cakewalk’s Sonar Producer X2a to record, arrange and mix the project.  I recorded my guitar parts with my old Epiphone Flying V.  I made the backwards solo using a lot of trial and error!  In order to go with the languid chord progression I had to try and predict what needed to be played forwards so it sounded correct when reversed!

For the vocals I used my usual old RodeNT2 mic, treated with some Fabfilter Pro-Q EQ, an EZMIX2 ‘70s Rock’ vocals preset and some hall reverb.  I sang the vocal twice, panning the main one 30% right and the supporting one 60% left with some phasing effect added to it.  The final mix was mastered using T-RackS CS Grand software with limiting provided by FabFilter’s Pro-L limiter.

I made the video using Serif’s MoviePlus X6.  Some of the footage is my own from a visit to Packwood House, a National Trust Property near Knowle, West Midlands with the rest gathered from free HD clips found on the internet.