Drop of Rain is a song I wrote in May of 2010. I was fooling around with the mandolin and decided to write a song about turning into a zombie. This seemed like a perfect combination to do in a musical/broadway style, so I decided to skip the standard rock instrumentation, and instead use some orchestral instruments. At the time I put together a quick music video:
For this song, I liked how things came out in the original version, and decided that I would just go in there, make some tweaks with the orchestration, and smooth out the mix a little bit. Unfortunately, when opening the session, I learned that in updating my software over the last year and a half, I had made most of the older instruments unusable. The midi data was there, but no sounds were playing.
I spent about an hour going through and reloading instruments to replace the piano, strings, and brass. Some of the percussion was still there, and I decided to replace the drums that were missing with some new Taiko samples I recently added to my film scoring template.
The next step is going to be orchestrating things out a little more at the end. The brass samples I am using now sound significantly better than the ones I was using last year, so I may add more horns and deep brass to the mix. The lyrics may also get some tweaking, although at this point that is up in the air. I may keep the vocal tracks, and just add a few more harmonies. The final version will sound very close to the original version in the video, but more polished, with more oomph in the percussion, a bigger orchestra sound, and a few more vocal layers.
