Roxette - Church of your heart - v1.0

From the moment I heard it on the Joyride album, I found this ballad the most memorable.

Vocals & backup vocals

It took me the usual two recording sessions for the lead vocals. Similarly to the more recent recordings, the second recording was without the original backing track. This helped me make fewer mistakes and better keep the tempo.

During the first recording session I also recorded a second track one octave higher, just to see how high I can go. While I rerecorded the vocals one octave lower, I kept the material as the backing vocals, fading it in only during the chorus and outro.

Lead guitar

A simple solo and a few bar chords limit the lead guitar's difficulty significantly. I spent quite a bit of time to find a good Helix patch for distorted guitar yet I still couldn't get close to the sound of the original recording.

Rhythm guitars: 1, 2 & distorted

Quite a lot of guitars were involved in the rhythm section. Guitars 1 and 2 play arpeggios of different chord shapes while the distorted rhythm guitar has that continuous strumming pattern of the open chords.

Bass

The bass works in tandem with the distorted rhythm guitar to keep the beat going across the whole song. It is a very simple bass line though.

Electric organ

This song shows a very effective use of an electric organ. Whenever it starts playing its warm vibrating tone is beautiful to listen to.

Keyboard - harmonica

Initially I was a bit reluctant to record this song because of the harmonica section towards the end. I do not play the harmonica and I don't plan on starting to learn it now. But then I remembered that I faced this problem before so I just reused the harmonica virtual instrument that I first recorded with in Heart of gold.

Drums

My major focus was on keeping the rhythm constant as the drums track isn't particularly complex for this song. Note to self: I should explore other drum sounds as this sound starts to become boring to listen to.

Mixing

I continued experimenting with the various plugins for compression, limiting, VU meter, EQ etc. I still don't feel that I'm on top of this mixing business. Investigating sidechain compression plugins is next on my list. The hope is to better separate the bass and drums.

Automation was repeatedly used for adjusting the volume of the tracks. It's a simple yet very effective tool to be able to control the dynamics of the song.

Misc

This song took me 10 tracks to record. It's frankly quite a lot of work and probably should have dropped a guitar or two.

The song's video had a church in it. So for the background photo I dug up a photo of a church I took in Iceland.

I've been doing these recordings for exactly a year now and this is my 15th recording. Happy anniversary, I guess :-)