The latest Crumplbanger Challenge set by vixoriadrift is limited to a few artists - one of which is Elliott Smith - so I had to breakl my hiatus to do a few E.S. mashups.
I chose Plainclothes Man cos it's my favourite Elliott song, I indeed used to dream in black and white for decades (and used to do film photography, developing etc) so, that lyric hit me like a brick, I totally know what he means about gradual decline and photographs not only documenting that but reminding you of happier times. I don't like looking at my old photos for this reason.
So to make it REALLY hard, I decided to have not one but two tracks with tempo/bar issues (one is pre click track helpfully with no drums in most of it, yeah, classic unequal bar length stuff, weirdly at the same points which helped, also I only have Lite so I can't do fancy 'Follow BPM' so if someone suggests that, they can pay for my copy of Studio :-P), and also some fun extraction gremlins which I kind of tried to make a sort of feature interweaving the vocals...so it sounds less unintentional.
I also had to do a lot of hopefully subtle sneaky re-ordering.for key/sequencing reasons that you might spot if you know the Carpenters track well but hopefully it's not obvious.
Also I worked out how you beat Elliott's musical tricks - go to the homework he cribbed :-)
Heatmiser / Elliott Smith - Plainclothes Man
The Carpenters - Ticket To Ride.
