When I took that pattern in to the studio and started working on it, the demo that I laid for it was much more mid-tempo than anything, but it was workable enough so that I could sit down and figure out chord progressions. The first progression I worked through was one that involved a bassline that was on the busy side, BUT it fell in line with what the drums were doing. The second piece of the music I worked through involved hits on the one. I knew that the song would need dynamics and something that would make it sound interesting when played live and the hits sounded like a perfect solution to me. (I actually still have voice memos with the recorded drums AND of me playing those first two parts on the Rhodes.) Those hits while another chord progression was happening created a bit of a song climax AND it went right back into the original form pretty easily. To be honest, I think it even took me a week or so to even record the rest of the song officially because I wanted to sit on the demo version and make sure that I didn't hear anything else on it. I wanted to go in and record all of the ideas I had in one shot (letting stuff sit and "figuring" it out is not a normal practice of mine as it may lead to overthinking in the studio, which is a NO GO). I finally went in to record the music and upon hearing it again, it seemed slow to me, so the first thing I did was bump the tempo up some. A loop of the drums was already recorded so I then patched in the Moog Minitaur and recorded the synth bass part. Once I laid the bass, I added a second part that bounced between two chords at a time. This was to serve as a vamp, or even a "part two" (shouts to The Isley Brothers who were the masters at doing this). Once that was finished, layering began. Synth pads, sprinkles of piano in the verses and a soft Rhodes pattern was added to aid in the song's movement. But things got real definitive once I added a lead synth via the Moog Voyager, which appears at the very beginning of the song in the melody line that introduces the entire piece. Having that lead part kinda tied everything together musically -- ESPECIALLY on the hits. I definitely remember getting hyped as SHIT when playing the synth lines over the hits. Once the music was finished, I named the instrumental "March Sadness," a play on the NCAA's "March Madness" which was in full swing at the time of the recording.
Where normally I send music to Phonte as soon as I finish it, I sat on this one for a couple of months before letting him hear it. The instrumental was my new favorite, BUT we weren't in full "record" mode for anything just yet. Because of that, he didn't hear this one until early May 2014 when The Foreign Exchange was in town for our show at The Howard Theater in DC. Before we left my house to go play the NPR Tiny Desk set, he and I got up in the studio to check some new ideas I had been working on. "March Sadness" was the first thing I played to which he responded with:
"Man, go'on and send me that shit..."
BET!
