A few weeks ago I bumped into this a cappella by c.layne and was immediately mesmerized. There’s a hypnotic quality about those vocals.

Since c.layne’s original version is quite experimental, I decided to play it more straight.

There were some technical challenges because in the posted track, the vocals are already mixed into a final stereo mix, including harmonies and effects. So I went mostly with the flow on those.

However I was able to stray from the original chord progression quite a bit, while still respecting the given harmonies. That was actually an interesting process and took me a while to come up with a chord progression I was happy with.

And as I often do, I couldn’t help but add just a tiny bit of extra harmonization in the bridge (which is the overlay of a smooth vocal part over a more staccato part). This involved separating the stereo tracks into two mono tracks, because the two parts were panned a bit left/right. And then I took the resulting mono track with the smooth vocals being quite a bit louder than the staccato one’s and ran them though my trusty VoiceLive harmonizer box with my chosen chords. However the staccato vocals were still there (softly) and responsible for small artifacts. So I EQ’d those artifacts out as best as I could, and hopefully the result is reasonably ok.

So thanks to c.layne for posting this track - I had a lot of fun jamming with it!

edit (2008-01-01): p.s. thanks for the anonymous recommendations, too!