Laurie, my song writing partner, came up with the lyrics for this song a few years ago after revisiting the city he was born and brought up in. Expecting to find places that triggered fond memories, he found instead a lot of ugly changes to the city landscape along with the familiar signs of urban decay. The UK city in question will rename anonymous here, but the kind of style we gave the song might offer some clues!

Technical notes:

Drums sounds were from XLN’s most excellent Addictive Drums with various percussion sounds from EZDrummer and Native Instruments’ Battery 3. Jammer Pro provided the basic reggae drum patterns but I heavily modified them as they didn’t sound as authentic as I wanted. Reggae drumming seems easy but it’s actually very complex to get right.  I watched a few YouTube videos of skilled reggae drummers to help me program the little snare fills that are the signature sound of the style.

I used Jammer Pro to come up with the initial electric piano and bass parts and then modified them, and the sounds for these came from my trusty Roland Fantom X6 synth.  I programmed the ‘Moog’, pad and organ sounds from scratch using MIDI.  Vocals and guitar parts are mine.  I did the ‘Jeff Beck’ sound-alike wah-wah solo on my Epiphone Flying V put through NI’s Guitar Rig 4.  The Police siren sounds sample was found on the tinterweb. The project was recorded and mixed in Sonar Producer X1. The final mix was mastered using TRacks3 Deluxe software with a tiny bit of extra limiting provided by Fabfilter’s ProL limiter.