My friend had said something nice and I had the glow of self-satisfaction. Then this happened.

How I Made It

The time is a slow 3/4 way down around 50 BPM.

The bottom track is bottleneck guitar in tuning CGDGBD, played in a single pass. Then I created a track to double that original part. It’s hard to get doubling just right. Maybe you don’t even want to. If it’s too perfect you can’t really hear the double. In the end I was only able to get a close enough match on the C section, but that was fine because it gave the song a dynamic high point when the double comes in.

The two purely digital tracks come from sending that recorded audio into the audio-to-MIDI converter at ai-midi.com, then importing back into my DAW as a MIDI instrument. If the converter was more accurate the digital tracks would sit right on top of the recorded audio. Fortunately it’s nowhere near accurate. The version of the guitar part that it created is hallucinating AI at its best. I put that same MIDI on two different tracks, panned left and right, and selected very different instrumental voices.

Want to make your own thing out of this? I put all the stems plus the MIDI file into a tarball at playingintongues.com/misc/LadyGlowWorm-stems.tar.

Rough Draft

The original mix had some charm that’s worth hearing if only to compare with the final one. I’d be interested to hear whether you think the first one is better.