I asked Richard, an old friend of mine (from our school days in the 1960s), if he’d like to try his hand at writing some song lyrics so we could maybe put them to music as a joint project.  After a while he came up with three really excellent sets of lyrics which will make great songs - if I can do them justice music-wise!

‘Running From The Reaper’ is the second we’ve put together. Richard’s  lyrics here are top notch, and would grace any Steely Dan album in my humble opinion!  They sound a warning to the vain and the greedy that a day of reckoning will come.

Technical notes:

I used PG Music’s Band In A Box to provide two rhythm guitars, bass and electric piano parts, and added my own guitar fills and a ‘David Gilmour-ish’ solo for the third chorus using my Epiphone Flying V guitar processed via Guitar Rig 5. I devised the MIDI parts for the synth and choir sounds. For the drums I customised some MIDI drum patterns and fills from XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums.

I didn’t use my trusty Roland Fantom X6 for the MIDI parts sounds this time. Instead I used IK Multimedia’s SampleTank 3 which I recently bought, and finding really impressive. For the vocals I used my usual RØDE NT2 mic, sweetening things with Sonar’s VX-64 Vocal Strip plugin and adding some ADT effects to the middle eight vocal using Waves’ excellent Reel ADT plugin. The whole project was done in Sonar Producer X3e and mastered there using IK’s T-RackS software with some extra limiter loudness provided by FabFilter’s Pro-L brickwall limiter and Sonnox’s Inflator.