Song For The Princess

I wrote this song when I was a senior in college. I just became acquainted with alternate tunings on the guitar and I fell in love with this tuning, DADF#AD, a very common alternate tuning. It was at the time I was graduating from college. I met this remarkable girl and I knew there was great potential here because she loved the Chronicles of Narnia, which was my gauge if there was a possibility of a relationship. The first time I remember playing this song for her was at a state park. I called that “Song for the Princess”. But she was young and she had things to work through, so for a short time I called it “Song for Friends”. But a few years later she had a change of heart. She started paying attention to me. She started smiling more. I didn’t want to get dumped again. She affirmed she was ready for a relationship, so the song went back to “Song For The Princess”. A year later we got married.

I always wanted to capture this song it in the fullest possible way I could. I tried recording it with different guitars in the early days of this project. It was good, but it wasn’t great. So Joe and I were on a quest. We wanted to make the recordings as competitive as we could when we compared them to other recordings. After much research, we were able to get some very good mics, Neumann KM54s, using V-72 to mic preamps, into a Manley EMU compressor, going into an Avid 192 interface.

But the most remarkable thing was the guitars we were using. Joe had a friend in Philadelphia who knew a person who built guitars. It was the renowned John Zeidler. When we went out to meet him in his shop in Philadelphia I immediately fell in love with his work. John was setting up a guitar he had built for someone, doing a few little tweaks on it. He let me play it. I didn’t know it was someone else’s guitar. I fell in love with the guitar and I asked him “Is this one for sale?” And he said, “Don’t you think I could build another one like this? So I said, “OK build me one like this one.” He built my guitar with an Adirondack spruce top which he used on all his guitars and used Koa for the back and sides with an ebony neck. But the guitar I used for “Song for the Princess” was a bit bigger guitar he made for Joe. It was made out of gorgeous curly maple with an Adirondack spruce top. It gave the fullness the song needed. I’ve never played guitars that sounded better than John Zeidler guitars. Sadly John passed away 15 years ago. We tip our hats to him. His guitar was the source that we needed to capture the exuberance of that song.

When I originally recorded the “Song for the Princess” I just programmed the midi drums. I liked them, so when we started recording it took us a bit of time to get the pocket of the congas right. I said, “Larry I’m not settled with it yet, I actually like what I programmed better than what we have at the moment.” We listened and slept on it. The next recording moment, Larry suggested adding a bongo part mimicking the congas but tuning the bongos way high. After we recorded it we said, “That’s it!” It gave it a finger snap sound. There are lots of different shakers, a ride cymbal and a kick and a swish cymbal. . I was picturing playing this song around a campfire with all these percussionists in an arc playing along with me and smiling. There was no bass in this song. The Zeidler guitar provided enough bass. You might ask where is the harmonica? Well, maybe we will do a version another time with harmonica? I envisioned this one as a duet with between guitar and percussion. Joe added the percussion at the end. He played the finger cymbal splendidly.

This song drove my recording career. The question that was always in the forefront was “How do I get this to sound awesome?” In the process of trying to make it sound breathtaking I learned a ton about recording, editing, balance, mixing and mastering. It’s amazing what happens when you pursue excellence on these different levels. There are many spinoff benefits, which I could elaborate on for a long time. It sounds exquisite to me now and the Princess still loves the song, which is truly excellent.

Here’s an example of the recording from it’s infancy from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away with Larry and I and our friend Oscar (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdu3wL5skXo).