Reply To: Mandelbrot Set: Complain About Illness (was: “Choose Your Instrumentation (was: “Runoff vote”)”)
The only thing I’d have to throw in is this: I’m not sure how practicable it would be to have all instruments playing at all times — some degree of discretion on instrumentation beyond which layers get added first may be necessary.
To work with, we have verse 1 (“Heya, Tom”), chorus, verse 2 (“I don’t want to nitpick, Tom”), chorus, bridge (“I’d like to help you, Tom”), solo, verse 3 (“I’ve got another meeting, Tom”), chorus. If anyone has any objections to my use of terminology, go right ahead. And that’s assuming the solo doesn’t get turned into “long instrumental jam session”. [Apropos of nothing, somehow it hadn’t struck me until now how each of those non-chorus stanzas has “Tom” in the middle of its first line. Listening to it, I’d only recognized “Tom” was used annoyingly often.]
Out of the instruments volunteered for, I believe the piano / keyboards (Borba, did you mean electronic keyboards, or keyboard instruments in general?) have the least performer-control over intonation, then the woodwinds. However, in my mind, the woodwinds aren’t generally well suited for a rhythm track — or at least these particular ones aren’t (c’mon, no one plays bassoon around here?).
(I’m presuming, I guess, that in general it’s easier to play an accompaniment with no melody than to play a melody without accompaniment.)
If we want to differ vastly from the original, to which I’m not opposed, someone had better “take creative control” (by which I just mean “make decisions about things like tempo and style”). My only real reason for inclining to stick with the original is that it’s probably easier, but if someone has an idea in mind and can tell everyone what to do, that wouldn’t be difficult either (for everyone else, I mean…).
As Borba notes above, it’s easy for piano to kinda monopolize a song if not watched carefully. Could either you or AtionSong lay down a simple, tedious backing track? What I’d envision is a full-length straightforward accompaniment, then also record a verse or chorus a little more stylishly. Don’t know if that’s something anyone else agrees with, so let’s pause for reaction to that idea while we pick out a style and tempo.