Falling Upward - by Laura Bryan

This is a song that my friend, Laura Bryan, wrote a few years ago and brought to me to produce.  She worked out the arrangement, and I just did the engineering and instruments.  She did all the vocals.  Since today is her birthday, I thought that I would share this with the community because very few people have heard this song.  It's about growing up with a verbally abusive parent and her escape from her harsh reality.  It was originally recorded in Sonar 7 but remixed in Splat.  I'm now happy to introduce Laura Bryan to the community.
 
The song is called "Falling Upward" and can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/ly...-upward-by-laura-bryan

Nice song .. Interesting orchestration and arrangement with tempo changes

Daryl, Makke, and Dan, thanks for your suggestions.  I didn't have Melodyne available when this was recorded, but I do now, so your idea makes sense.  Dan, I see that, now.  I think that I can fix that.  Thank you all for your time and ideas.

Thanks, James!  She'll be glad to hear this.

eph221

daryl1968
Very cool song and very creative with the changes here and there. Creative production too.
Nice playing and vocals except there seems to be a timing issue early on with the acoustic guitar versus the drums (could be my ears). It would be interesting to run the acoustic through Melodyne.....?...! 

Daryl,  it's interesting about the tunings of guitar.  I have studied and played guitar since 1969 (the year we landed on the moon),  the g -string and (esp) the b-string ALWAYS sound out of tune to me, regardless of the guitar having been intonated.  Some others have claimed to have this bias as well.  I can play an open e chord and the b-string ALWAYS sounds wrong to me. :D  Interesting song though, the abrupt changes in tempo..me no likey but that's a compositional thing.  It's extremely well produced.

Very interesting.
I really meant Lynn could try to use Melodyne to fix the timing though.

Interesting tune, nice vocal and very different arrangement, enjoyed in the main but like one other found the jumping around a little tiring.  Thanks for sharing.

eph221 I hear what you are saying about the the b string.

Very nice tune!  I left some remarks on SoundClound mainly about how cool I think the arrangement is and dig the changes.  The overall mix sounded classic to me as though I was listening to a vinyl record.  Were you going for that?  To me it is very pleasing to the ear and I feel younger listening to it.  I listened twice but may have to go back for another hit to get me through the work day.  Thanks.  Nice work, Lynn.

I liked it.    I'm sure you could do some post-editing to clean things up, but as-is I think the song comes across nicely.    Cool song, good arrangement, and obviously captured well if it was circa SONAR 7! 
 

Lynn, sounds great. Especially liked the guitars. But everything sounded great to me.

Tori Amos, in a Louisiana swamp?   :)
 
Very cool, nice two part arrangement. There is a lot of ear-candy mixing but it's old-school, as someone mentioned, could easily see the needle tracking in the vinyl on this one.
 
Your mix holds up pretty well, and the tune is a winner. 
 
The drums sound at times like they have a gate on them that closes pretty quick? Particularly the snare? If you get a time machine at any point, perhaps you could go back and see if you like it with more resonance on the drums. But, I think the way you have it supports the "old school" feel, so there you go.
 
noice!
 
-Tom

Thank you all for responding.
Chas, thanks for your time and kind words.
Freddy, Laura will be delighted by your words.  Much appreciated.
Tom, the old school production was purely by accident.  The drums are from an Alesis DM5 with no effects.  This was from the days before decent virtual drummers.
Kenny, I originally recorded with electric guitar, but Laura preferred the acoustic version, however I like the slide guitar part I wrote in the original version.  Thanks for you comments.

Andy, thank you so much for your kind words.  I'm hanging on to my DM5 just in case I pull out some older material.  Rock on!