i’m interested in this ‘sketch’ idea…how do you put together the sketches in terms of instrumentation? do you have a stock of samples/patches to draw on which you then refine? how far you take it during the sketching phase. how do you exact quality control to make sure nothing gets missed and none of the weaker ideas get picked? i’d love to hear one of the original sketches so i could get an idea of how much you work it up before you shelve it.

…So I thought I’d pick a recent track and show a few snapshots of the stages it goes through before ending up as releasable.

NB – All audio in this post is 64k mp3, aside from the Soundcloud player at the end

If I Could Tell You – Released April 2009

We started working on this in November 2006 and, as you can hear, the sketch consists of a load of musical elements with placeholder drums and bass.

2nd Nov 2006

The next step was to try and figure out more interesting drums and bass, so we started playing with much more chopped up arrangements. You’ll hear that the ideas for the bass were more or less carried through into the final version.

7th Aug 2008

Over the next couple of months we started to look at the instrumentation again and see what could be added, what could be thrown out, and what needed to be rearranged.

18th Aug 2008

14th Sep 2008

We then spent the next month arranging the track into a full piece while still rejigging the instrumentation and writing new bass progressions.

20 Nov 2008

29th Nov 2008

29th Dec 2008

We thought we’d got to a point where the track was more or less ready to go, but there was something nagging us about the drums. They were holding the tune back so at the very last minute we threw them all out and replaced them with the drums that give the whole tune a lot more space and that worked in sympathy with the instrumentation much more effectively, and that’s what you hear in the final version that was released a couple of years after it first began.

4th April 2009

Blu Mar Ten – If I Could Tell You by Blu Mar Ten