Some works-in-progress:

Both hi-fi and lo-fi versions of the files have been refreshed. 

I’d been listening to earlier versions off and on over the last month, at work, and I finally made some notes about what I didn’t like:

Abstracts, it turns out, was a much older version. I had completely forgotten that I’d already fixed many of the things I noticed. So the new version hasn’t had any recent work, but is a remix that I did a while ago but never refreshed on the web.

Future Imperfect. has been beefed up a little, with one instrument dropping out completely (no more Pipe Organ) and another returning in its place (subtle Melange strings).

Big Boys has has more radical work done: Thanks to a free VST plugin, TickyClav
from Big Tick Audio. This great little soft-synth (did I mention it was free?) picks one thing to do, and does it well. After playing around with it, I decided to replace the clav sound in Big Boys, and ended up recording a few new phrases, and removing some existing instrument tracks that were no longer needed. In the process, I also decided to re-balance some sections of the song with an eye to how this would sound if there were only one guitar player. So now, where before there
were clean guitar chords backing a lead guitar, the backing track is now being played on TickyClav.

Additionally, I re-recorded the brass section with a different, better sounding patch. And removed a second keyboard sound that was responding to the brass MIDI track. You really couldn’t tell it was there but it was muddying things up a little.

Just a quick couple of days work, but the 2008 versions of these two songs are much improved, I think.