My favorite Savage Garden song whose piano line I always enjoyed. I was really hoping that one day I can record it and I'm glad that I finally got a v1 out.

Piano

I've been playing the piano line for a long time now for practice and fun. Yet the challenge was always to keep the tempo and timing accurate since this is the instrument driving the whole song. I used Maverick, my go to piano sample from my Native Instruments library. By now probably I should start exploring other piano samples as well since the library has several other large samples.

Keyboard: Violins

Found them in the Session Strings package from Native Instruments (all the details are in the recording sheets). I am really happy with the sound. It's rich and nicely sampled from real instruments.

Vocals

These are low volume vocals, just like in Shine on. Not having that many instruments makes the vocals stand out even more. I did several takes and settled on the final one that's with the least mistakes.

Post-processing and mixing

I applied echo and lots of reverb to all instruments, just as the original recording does it. This way they can fill the sound space despite a low number of instruments. I also started experimenting with compression but I don't yet get the hang of it.

The final mix is low on volume, a recurrent pattern for my previous recordings as well. I'm trying not to clip the waves (and thus distort the sound) but I can't yet bring up the volume of the lows. I started reading Mixing Secrets by Mike Senior, a book with good reviews - hopefully I'll crack this.