This song is one of my favorites from the new album "A Song Across Wires". I wrote this track on acoustic instruments (guitar, a six string fretted cello I had built that's like a bass or baritone equivalent of the viola de gamba, glockenspiel and others). Tydi and I worked together on the track (beats and bass) over email and eventually in person. We had a blast in the studio on this and eventually the culmination of these efforts was sent in a rough state to the country artist Plumb.

She wrote a wonderfully simple and catchy vocal. We worked with this vocal for a while and it became apparent after some time that her management and representatives had a different idea about what this song should be and what it should be for so we began looking for new singers (still bummed about this, Plumb is a great artist).

Enter Tanya Zygar. She is friends with Tydi and we sent her the track and she wrote a beautiful verse melody. I sang a multi-track chorus top line and sent it back to her. We went back and forth with iterations of lyrics and eventually settled on a nautical theme (which I love). Stem the Tide is an expression originally used to mean that a ship was sailing against the tide fast enough to make headway over the ground or to move faster than the tide in the opposite direction. 

I spend about a week after all this doing vocal editing, glitching and comping and eventually laid the vocal into the final mix.

All said and done, this song probably took in work hours the better part of 2 months. I worked on in in Logic 6.43 on a 24bit PT rig (OS9), OS X Logic 7 and 9, Live 8 and 9 and was stem printed from Logic 9. 

My favorite thing about it is the acoustic instruments playing in tandem to the analog synths, plugins and glitch elements. Very proud to share this one with you.

Stem the Tides

Stem The Tides

Grammy Nominated Composer and Technologist. I am a man that believes sound can change the world. I seek, I learn

Stem The Tides

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