Another Life
The final single from Freyja Elysy’s upcoming EP ‘To Stop The World Turning’ is Another Life and it was released last week. Have a listen above whilst you read.
When Freyja first showed me Another Life she had written a comprehensive guitar part for most of the song. I listened to a demo with MIDI version of the guitar and played along with the score. It’s an interesting challenge when somebody writes for another instrument. Freyja plays piano more than guitar, so her instincts lead to chord shapes that are not immediate on the guitar! I lenjoyed being pushed to memorise new movements. It reminded me of the freshness of the early years when I was learning guitar.
The song also features double-bass (Richard F. Jackson), drums (Zach Breskal), violin (Non Morgan) and cello (Kirsten Miller). Freyja scored all of these parts in advance and produce a version of the song with plug-ins that simulate the sound of the all the instruments. Freyja then worked with us to refine the parts and play them for real in a way that made sense to us as musicians. It also lets us add expression, dynamics, tone, humanity and imperfections.
Many non-musicians (or non-music geeks) might not be able to tell the different between MIDI instruments and the live alternatives if they heard them in a mix side-by-side. The most advanced software is able to use audio samples in a way which makes the distinction even harder to distinguish. AI is speeding up this process and could even assist a human in writing the parts in the first place.
I am glad Freyja chose the slower, more complicated and more human path of finding collaborators. She reached out to musicians she knew and applied for funding that would allow her to access a professional recording studio and expand the scope of her songs and productions. A network of musicians were connected by the arrangement, the recording and now the finished piece of art: the song that we are all a part of. Freyja devoted many hours to the mixing process to bring a complex arrangement into a cohesive whole.
The song is now in its second week on the BBC Radio Wales A list. This means it will be played on primetime radio shows across Wales and thousands of new listeners will hear the song. I think if Freyja had taken the easy route, asked AI to churn out an arrangement, run it through some plugins, got an AI mastering engineer (instead of seasoned pro Charlie Francis), not bothered to hire Owain at Studiowz, but just used AI to generate drum tracks and guitar tones … well, the song would still exist. It would not have sounded as moving, effective or human as it does. And I doubt it would have ended up on the radio alongside so many other great performances and recordings.
