A Fool's Paradise
We develop taste a lot faster than skill. Or, in other words, we all know we suck way before there's anything we can do about it.Matthew Colville
The Album
A Fool's Paradise was the first album that I released as a solo artist. The music is instrumental hard rock, with the electric guitar as the main melodic instrument. In true modern-day fashion, it was a bedroom product: I played all stringed instruments, and programmed the drums plus what little keyboards there are.
The 2024 copyright and release date conceal the fact that this album was originally written and sort of recorded way back in 2012-2013. For various reasons, it never saw a proper release on Spotify or any other platform. For many years, it was just this collection of songs that I had lying around on my Soundcloud. People would ask me when I was going to get around to re-recording it, but that project always took a back seat to anything else I might have had going on.
What stayed my hand had absolutely nothing to do with a lack of awareness of the many faults of the original version. On the contrary: I was fully conscious of just how much I would need to learn, and how hard I would need to work, in order to do the songs justice. And that was kind of part of the problem. The more time went by and the more I learned, the clearer the realization that I was basically going to have to do it all over again. It was a mountain that I was going to have to climb, and the prospect felt truly daunting.
The Technology
In the end, many little things added up and created a critical mass that jump-started this cold and dormant reactor. Of course I learned bits and pieces when working on other projects between 2013 and 2021, all of which I could put to good use making AFP sound better in just about every aspect. A lot of it was technology, and I'm not just talking about drum samplers getting better and sounding ever more human.
The decisive thing turned out to be amp simulation plugins. Getting my first guitar plugins inspired me to lay down some tracks on a few songs from A Fool's Paradise. The results were not just inspiring, I would go so far as mind-blowing. And that was just the start. As soon as I got my hands on the plugin I wanted all along, it was only a matter of time. This was how I wanted to sound, and that decided everything.
I could of course have settled for a remix of the 2013 version of the album. It is still something I haven't completely ruled out. It'd be interesting to see what I could make of the original tracks with the software and knowledge that I've collected since. It probably would never see any release, it would be something I did for myself, just to satisfy my curiosity, and that automatically shoves it way down my list of priorities, to be quite honest. Having had that unsatisfactory version splashing about for more than a decade before coming around to re-recording it and releasing it properly has made me wary of the prospect of spending too much time on old stuff. Fortunately I have got proper wind in my sails with the follow-ups. Yes: plural.
The Rhythm Section
When listening back to the original, several things struck me. I could of course get way better guitar tones even with the Blackstar ID:30 TVP that I bought in 2013, towards the end of the project. (It might have been used on one or two small clean parts.) But the aspect that needed a lot more attention was the rhythm section. The (played) bass and (programmed) drums on the original showed beyond all reasonable doubt that the songs were written and recorded by a guitar player. There was just no way I was going to offer this material for release with bass and drum tracks that sounded like bad, boring demo scratch tracks. I therefore decided to devote some of my free time to not only practice playing bass, but also sit down and play along to my songs until I had a bass line that really helped the songs along. If it took 300 edits in one song, I was going to get it done. Likewise, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the drums, adding accents and syncopations here and there, redialing the humanization, reining in the dynamics, everything in an all-out effort to make it sound less robotic and a little more spontaneous and musical.
The Guitars
The guitars were a bit of a dilemma for me. It is plain just from listening back to the original melodies and leads that I am a better guitar player now than I was back then, no matter which perspective you take—speed, precision, feel or timing. What I was concerned about wasn't the technical ability to play the first solo in Towards the Shore a second time. I like the original and I am proud of it. But the moments on the album that I'm proudest of have nothing to do with technique, but rather feel. It's that note here or that bend there, when everything just clicks into place. Maybe I could do those again, by why chance it?
I had to start somewhere, and the obvious first point on the agenda was to redo all the heavy rhythm parts. I laid those down using my trusty old Les Paul Studio, just as I had done back in the day. There are a few places on the original where I used the inverted power chord trick to fake a seven-string sound—those parts were obviously redone on my actual seven-string guitar. The amp models are the JMP 2203, the JCM 800 and the Silver Jubilee, boosted with the yellow overdrive, except for the slightly softer songs that don't use an OD at all. I tried to mix and match amps according to the needs of the individual song, so the setup varies wildly between the tracks. The clean guitars were redone using the clean-to-crunch amp of the Neural DSP Archetype Petrucci, and the bass parts on the Ampeg simulation in Guitar Rig 6.
Originally, I had planned to re-record the acoustic guitars as well. The originals were not particularly well-recorded: just an SM57 pointing towards the sound hole. What I found when compressing and EQ:ing them was that they sounded good enough for my purposes. There is not a song on the album that is truly driven by acoustic guitar, I used my old Yamaha six- and 12-strings more as a melodic percussion instruments. In fact, the more I replaced the old fingerpicked nylon-string stuff with clean electric parts, the more sense everything made in the overall sound picture.
Throughout this process, I was constantly worrying about the day I was going to start doing the leads. Then something happened. As the backing tracks fell into place one by one, I noticed something completely insane. The new drums, bass and rhythm guitars, properly compressed and equalized, not to mention the improved performance, actually made the old lead guitar sound better. I soon found that it didn't take more than a tiny nudge on the EQ to make the old leads sit pretty nicely in the overall sound picture. As if they weren't at all played on a 13-year-old practice amp. It was a huge relief, because it felt like it moved the deadline forward by months. In the end, though, I just couldn't resist touching up the overdriven melody part on Elegy, not because of the sound, but because it had somehow escaped my attention once upon a time that my Telecaster was out of tune.
The Songs
The arrangements are broadly identical to the originals. The harder and rockier sounds have been re-recorded 1:1 as far as I've been able to, no reinterpretations, no corrections, no creative ideas. The softer songs have seen more rearranging, mostly because they quite frankly needed a whole lot of help.
Actually, it is a shorter album than the original, and not just because I decided to fade many endings quicker. (Note to self: write distinct endings for all new songs!) The officially released 2024 version consists of 11 songs, whereas the original had an even dozen. The unaccompanied Strat noodling that was the original first track ("Prologue") just had to go. There is a reason why that Strat is deliberately played in a slightly sloppy way, and what finally made me bring out the scissors was that I had no intention of ever explaining exactly why.
Having done away with the prologue, I could do the same with the "Epilogue", so Flight from Arcadia is just that and doesn't fade out into more Strat noodling. It does retain a fairly prominent clean Strat part as a call-back to the title track, which I deemed was quite enough. This was also not the only change I made to Flight, as the middle section saw eight bars removed. If you can't make it obvious that something is a joke, don't bother with it.
The Artwork
I've always had a fairly good idea of what I wanted for the cover art for AFP: a fantasy landscape, with the obligatory tiny figure in the foreground, gazing across the stormy sea towards some idealized paradise. But the state of my art is sadly not much better than this concept sketch:
When I managed to improve the sound quality the way I did, I decided that the album not only deserved a proper release, but also some serious cover art by a real artist—absolutely no AI involved whatsoever! My first port of call was DeviantArt. I did a general search of the entire site for "fantasy landscape" and scrolled for ages, popping up Chrome tabs to zoom in on the artwork whose thumbnails really stood out for some reason or the other.
It soon turned out that four out of the six paintings I liked were by the same guy: Mr. Michal Kváč from Brno, Czechia. I reached out to Michal, and after a few days of back and forth, this is how his artwork turned out, after I defaced it with my name and the album title:
Here are some links: Michal's DeviantArt, there's an official site, another official-looking site, and then I get a kick out of checking out how he arrived at the finished product.