“Seems I’ve Been Waiting” is the latest single set for release with my three-piece band: Naros Fortuna. The writing process of the song was pretty typical of the way I approach most of my writing. The song started life on acoustic guitar as a chord progression and after spending some time playing those chords the first line and subject for the song shortly followed. As with most of my songs, I will tend to write them so that they can stand by themselves and remain impactful when stripped-back and played acoustically. This way I know if I produce and add more instrumentation it is likely that it will only heighten that impact.
From a production stand-point in this track I knew I wanted to have some element of the acoustic version featured. At the same time had the idea of playing it as a full band and knew that it had the potential to open up and become a powerful, widely dynamic song. This is where the arrangement of the song came about.
The song starts with an acoustic guitar and vocal. On the vocal I used a Fairchild compressor to boost the gain and lightly compress, whilst also using a Moog delay with a fast delay time to thicken the vocal very subtly. Reverb-wise I used a plug-in, shortening the decay time and over-all wetness mix whilst scooping the mid frequencies s to get a very natural room-sounding reverb. Similar processing was done to the acoustic guitar, this was done for this part of the song to emphasise its intimacy. When the full band enters the whole energy of the track is taken to another level. At this point in the song the character of the vocal changes quite dramatically. To accentuate this change and capitalise on the boost of energy I added a ‘Slap-back’ tape-delay to intensify the body of the vocal.
The overall production idea for the track was to keep the instrumentation simple and for everything that was in the track to contribute towards the song living and breathing.