shidasp – Sasha

Shidasp, from L.A. (US), has just released a new track, Sasha, and we’ve been taking a listen in the studio at Send Me Your Ears today.
Sasha is a song of love, a lullaby to an unborn child and to someone the artist loves. Before we dive any further into this review, it is essential that we give kudos to Shidasp for their bravery and honesty in their biography and their reasons for turning to music. A failed suicide attempt led Shidasp back to music and we are so glad to hear that Shidasp is making such beautiful music after such a horrific personal event. We applaud Shidsap for turning to music as therapy as so many of us do.

The almost harp like acoustic guitar throughout the track is dreamy and well played. The variation in finger picking throughout the song adds interest to the listener in a song that is gentle and simple. It is, after all, a lullaby.

The song consists of layered vocals, guitar, bass and some sort of long haunting notes on a wind sounding instrument! Its not like us not to be able to put our finger on a sound, but we’re stumped here! Whatever it is, its beautiful and it adds a real almost celtic feel to the song.

The general feel of the song reminded us of Martyn Joseph’s, Dolphins Make Me Cry.

Vocally souding a little like Claudio Sanchez from Coheed and Cambria, Shidsap’s voice is smooth, high, beautifully airy and breathy and with just a touch of vulnerability.

There’s some lovely use of stereo in the vocal track. The vocals have been very well recorded. Its possible to hear all the sibilance in the voice, without those frequencies becoming dominant. This is hard to do and there’s some great control here.

As a gentle song that moves along dreamily, this perhaps would be a great candidate for sync licensing. You can just imagine this song being in the background of a movie where the focus is on the characters emotions.

Sasha is ever so well mixed and mastered and to our minds, a great piece in itself. We’d suggest just a touch more bright reverb to make the track feel more dreamy and floaty, and add to that lullaby feel. A dip at around 60-70Hz where the bass is a little dominant together with an overall shelf dip as high as about 120Hz to balane the low end frequencies. A tiny cut around 4-500Hz would balance out the slightly dominant backing vocal “oohs” and a tiny show boost of the top 1 11/2 octaves would just add a little more brightness.

Sasha is an absolutely beautiful lullaby that made us all smile today. This is a really promising song and we hope to hear a great deal more from Shidsap, who touched our hearts today.