For anyone who may be interested in the history of Fool's Gold, I have just found something in my archive that may be of some historical significance. It is the earliest known version of Fool's Gold I have, dating all the way back to November of 2006. The version I have today is a derivative of that original project file from late 2006, and I have just dug up a file showing what the mix sounded like at its earliest point.
Bear in mind, it's not very good -- but we all start somewhere! The snares are incorrect (and the sound I used for them is not very good), I still hadn't worked out the horn countermelodies at this point, and it makes use of my much older set of Derbyshire samples (meaning they sound much muddier than they should). The whole thing is not mixed very well at all, but I was just getting started with music at that point.
This mix has really evolved quite substantially over the years. It was originally made in FL Studio 6 using this really crap synth/sample library called Sonik Synth 2, if I remember rightly. Soon I moved up to EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Silver Edition, but at this point the whole project got to be a bit unwieldy in poor FL Studio (not to mention having to have the Derbyshire elements mixed in ACID because I couldn't figure out a reliable way of having complex sample tracks like the bassline run throughout the whole mix in FL). Finally I decided to move the entire project into ACID and work from there. It was in ACID (several months later) that the "final" version of the original Fool's Gold line was made, version 2.6.7f. At this point, I stopped working on Fool's Gold for a long time, because I was happy with how the mix had progressed and thought it had finally reached a point where it was good enough. But then, a few months later, I began to transition from making music on Windows to making music on the Mac. As time went on, I got more and more proficient with making music in Logic on the Mac. I wanted to do a new version of Fool's Gold in Logic, and I did -- what is now known as my Fool's Gold Closing Theme. Eventually, however, I decided that I wanted to be able to continue working on my original mix, so I elected to go through the rather colossal undertaking of porting over my entire massive Fool's Gold project from ACID into Logic. It took many hours to finally complete, but I have now re-established the entire mix in Logic, and that's where I am working from today. Phew!
Click here to listen to the November 2006 version of Fool's Gold.
And for anyone interested,
click here to see what my massive Fool's Gold project looks like in Logic.