New Springsteen inspired single "UPTOWN MORNING" r

Finally I closed the book on my new tune... Uptown Morning.



LISTEN HERE

I wrote the lyrics in spring 2008, did the first sketch/recording in summer 2008. Started recording in August...

Anders Fogelqvist (sweden) played the piano and hammond in autumn 2008. And after the mix was "done" I almost closed the book, but despite putting out ads for a saxophone player I ran into problems with getting someone willing to play the sax tracks.

The whole project came to a break at this point and nothing happened before spring 2009 when Mike Potter (US) contacted me and wanted to record the sax parts. We started working on that over email without a schedule and during the summer months we agreed on a nice solo that he recorded. We we're about to continue with the rhythm parts but Potter had other work and family related stuff that made me press the pause button again.

After a month or two, now autumn, Martin Rost (sweden) had found an old ad I had put up about needing a sax player for the track, he emailed me and wanted to record the backing sax parts. So off the project goes again and Martin records the final sax parts.

Then Mike Potter contacted me again and wanted to finish what he started and record backing sax as well.

So in the end the track ended up with dual saxophone backings by Mike Potter and Martin Rost, a sax solo by Mike Potter, piano and hammond by Anders Fogelqvist and the rest by me.

When I had all tracks together it was almost a year since I had mixed the tune and a lot had changed. My experience in mixing had improved I had started working in a professional studio. So I bounced the tracks as group and did the final summing and level adjustment on the SSL G8000 console at work. This made a huge improvement to the overall mix that so far was only mixed in the box with plugins.

For mastering I used a combination of Fairman tube mastering compressor and tube eq along with some top of the line digital plugins from Flux. I went for a not too squashed final mastering, level-wise along the lines of the digitally remastered edition of the Born to Run record, the record that initially was the source of inspiration for this tune.

I'd love to hear you thoughts so please share, critics, comments... everything's welcome!

The vocal is pretty muddy Ludvig; hard to hear what you're singing sometimes. I'd boost the level a tiny bit and EQ is much more around the 11kHz range; while EQing it have a copy of Bon Jovi's Always* to hand for comparison, as the register and timbre of your voices are similar, so getting the clarity of the verse parts in that track would be good to aim for. Other than that I can't see a problem with the mix - nice guitar tone, perfect positioning of everything else; will have to listen at home though for the final judgement as I only have medium-sized speakers at work. I'm not the biggest Springsteen fan in the world** but I caught my foot tapping at one point so it's certainly got something. Keep it up!

*Disclaimer: don't play this too much or your ears may run off in protest.


**Or indeed a Springsteen fan at all

I am a massive Springsteen fan and I loved it! (perhaps no suprise in that, given my opening statement).

Great stuff.

I'm also hearing some Strummer coming through; that's not a bad thing in my books. I guess if that song was a year in the making the album should be done somewhere in the 2020's :wink:

Ok...
Not to be negative but almost all of those tunes have the same four chord structure....Springsteen does it and so does Bon Jovi so whilst not being a bad thing...it IS noticeable.
Alan's right....the vocals do let the recordings down slightly and it's less to do with the sound quality(and i'm sure I'll be shouted down for this) but more the accent and pronunciation.

Tough room.... :wink:

As a minor aside, I somehow got to listening to the single before I'd even registered 'Springsteen-inspired'. And to be honest, I was rather taken aback ? after looking at the graphic, I thought I was in for some old school house or something along those lines.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts guys!

Great to hear to some guys like it and I will take the constructive feedback into account and learn from it