February - One Chord

“One Chord” is sort of a meta song. A song written in a song writing challenge about writing songs. It all starts with one chord on your guitar or on your keyboard. Every song! The “making of” became sort of an interesting journey.

This is how today’s challenge went:

6:30 a.m. - Wrote some notes on the One Day One Song challenge in my diary when I realized that my motivation to accept this challenge is based on my very ability to churn out songs quite easily. This sort of foreword to my imaginary Making-Of diary gave the inspiration and I wrote about half of the lyrics and some intended keywords for the missing parts Productive fifteen minutes.

5:50 p.m. - In the studio, tinkering with the sound carpet for about an hour and experiment with the vocal settings.

20:30 p.m - Back at it. Vocal complete, then guitar and the drum carpet near the climax at the end

22:30 p.m. - Fifth attempt at mastering. Either the end of the song gets cut off, or the beginning. Something’s wrong.

22:36 p.m. - Song complete!!!

Learning 1 - Why do some organ sounds work with the sustain pedal and some not?

Learning 2 - I ran out of song and had to Google how to create a longer song in Logic Pro.

Learning 3 - Can’t use microphone and guitar at the same time.

Alex Ames February Songs Cover.jpeg


February - Straight At It

There are so many things we straight for. Money, electronics, luxury, shoes. Name it, you got it. But let’s go straight for the other stuff. The real stuff.

20:30 - First sit-down with an empty sheet of paper. Under the shower after biking I already had a chorus idea, so it takes fifteen minutes to flesh out the first two verses and bridges.

21:15 - Production start. The base-track of my guitar and me starts it all. Then follows the piano and the auto-drummer.

23:45 - Learning of the day: do not use an e-guitar! It takes ages if you want to develop a good solo or tune the sound that it does not overload the song. Second lesson of the day: same applies for a cool smoky B3 organ solo. All into the bin, 30 minutes lost for nothing. I ended up with no solo. I should buy a harmonica.

0:00 - I love copy and paste. The strip settings for each channel were supereasy to set up. To improve performance of my Mac I bumped the piano and the bass to WAV before final mix.

0:15 - Master done. Lesson three: don’t forget to switch off the metronome. Master again.