February - No Apologies

A man in a dusty town. A woman in scorn. Guns, games, desert, duel, death, a Western Blues Opera in 2:30 minutes. Number 9 in my One Day One Song challenge. 

Today’s timeline:

During lunch: jotted down some notes to a ZZ-Top-ish idea about a Western style revenge love story. Had to end with a tombstone, that much was clear from the start.

9:00 a.m. - First contact with my recording. Tinkered with the guitar to flesh out the lyrics. Not much use for much melody in this one, so I kept it between my simple voice and the gnarling guitar. Completetd the lyrics.

9:30 a.m. - First runthrough of the rhythm guitar, followed by a runthrough of the vocals.

10:00 a.m. - Bass track and tinkering of the drum variations

10:20 a.m. - The lead guitar comes down. Have the idea to double it and spread it out. Have to do the solo parts all over in order to play them exactly the same two times.

11:00 a.m. - The lead guitar took too lonk, but can’t be helped. Mixing, adding effects. Need to play around with the EQ for a while to distinguish the rhythm guitar and the vocals and balancing the two lead guitars

11:30 a.m. - Done mixing. First listen outside of Logic Pro. Vocals too soft, need more bite. Another mixdown, better.

11:40 a.m. - Song done.

Lessons learned today:

Keep the solo parts simple in order to double or tripple the sound.

The straighter the story, the better the song turns out to be.

Did I wish for more?

Yeah, some powerful drum rolls would have been great. And some breaks here and there instead of the computer’s autofil.

February - Midnight Song

The challenge is called One Day One Song. And the “Day” begun at midnight, sharp. Being up late —very late— for Superbowl — helped conceiving this song, the weather with light snowfall, too, to get some inspiration. In hinsight, I could have left more out. But there are still twenty songs to go. Twenty songs to imprive.

The timeline:

0:00 a.m. - Superbowl night, kick-off in half an hour. Started writing Midnight Song on the chime of the churchbell and was done fifteen minutes later.

0:15 a.m. - I switched to the e-guitar and started recording. By now I am pretty proficient in splicing a song together out of as few recorded bars as possible. After the basic guitar and vocal tracks I had some pep-up ideas.

1:00 a.m. - Mixing start. The pep-up parts distract more than they bring to the sound-table. Tune it down, down, down and concentrate on guitar and vocal instead.

1:20 a.m. - Done. Superbowl time! Don’t worry, I recorded the first quarter.

Learnings:

I had a hard time adding a line with a reference to current events into the song. Not rhyming wise, but more like an internal block to keep the song “eternal”. By adding “lockdown”, the song will always be stuck in 2020 or 2021. Always and forever.

Logic Pro inside baseball: why is the drum pattern editor only available for electronic drum sets and not for the regular drum sets?

February - The End of the World

It turned out more jazzy than expected but I like that little piece. What would you do to follow your object of affection?

Extremely straight forward from writing and production.

11:00 a.m. - Sat down to put down the lyrics. Again my writing background helped me to conceive a small story and press it into three verses. Following her, all the problems, eventually they meet and stay together.

5:00 p.m. - Produced the first round of base tracks. The guitar worked quite nicely and my fingers did things I thought impossible. I don’t consider myself great instrumentalist, but this one I am proud of. Even the solo is not instant blah.

8:00 p.m. - Started the evening session with the bass track. Not too imaginative. Afterwards selected corrections of the vocals. For mastering, I got lazy and simple added Izotope’s Ozone plug-in.

9:15 p.m. - Done!

February - Phantom Pain

A song for someone missing. Honestly, I have no clue how I came with these lyrics. To compare missing someone to an empty pack of cigarettes, the joys of smoking , and phantom pains? At least I spared you rhyming “pain” with “insane”.

Somewhere in the middle of the day - started checking some sounds and chord progressions. Remembered an earlier lesson: have a song ready before working on arrangement. Sat down and put down most of the words. Aimed for something Bon Iver, ended up with Bowie-ish vibes.

6:00 - Recorded a base track with piano and vocals for one verse, one bridge and one chorus.

6:45 p.m. - stopped recording, family time.

9:00 p.m. - back to the drawing board. Cloned the basic structure. Found a lot of sound patterns to use, threw away most of them after a few tries.

10:00 p.m. - Song structure stands. All vocals recorded, the chorus cloned. Ending and beginning give some timing trouble.

10:15 p.m. - Background vocals.

11:00 p.m. - mixing, balancing the vocals

11:15 p.m. - final listen.

11:20 p.m. - song done. Another day, another song.

Learnings today:

Learning 1: the learning works! Put down an almost complete song before recording.

Learning 2: What I don’t know now, I won’t learn during project. It simply costs too much time to find out how certain things work. E.g. I’d like to adjust the background vocals to exactly synchronize with the main vocals. It’s possible. But I am too highly strung to figure it out or search on YouTube.

February - Ladder to the Moon

Tough day, though I had almost the whole afternoon to make up my mind what today’s song should sound like. I threw away a different concept after wasting two hours tinkering. Especially the lyrics would escape me. My late afternoon walk offered me a great view of the mountains and I tried to caputure that moment in words, failing. “Ladder to the Moon” is the emergency song, though after listening to it for a few times during mixing, I’d say: it’s different, but fine.

5:30 p.m. - watched darkness fall after a very beautiful winter day, mountains in the distance, near but still far, majestic sight. Tinkered with some lyric elements while sitting on a bench, enjoying the view.

6:30 p.m. - Put down some foundation recordings for the mountin song idea. Chord progressions went fine. Lyrics still missing.

9:00 p.m. - Recording starts on song five.

10:00 p.m. - Recording stops on song five. Shoot, lyrics crap, song crap. Searched for some inspirations, came up with the great guitar sound, immediate inspiration. Drum track, bass, click-track guitar and vocals within minutes. Started recording the vocals. Stopped several times. The structure and free-floating guitar made it impossible to sing to it and find my way around the chord schema.

10:45 p.m. - Live recording the whole song. Almost good. One the last “building a ladder” came out “buying a ladder”. Might work as well, just not as romantic. Threw in some standard mastering plugins. Done

11:00 p.m. - Mixing. Throwing Bass and Drums out. Bouncing. Oops, another mixdown after one config mistake.

11:30 p.m. - Done. Whew, this one was messy.

Learnings of the day:

• Fail faster, you might not get lucky with a quick alternative song that quickly.

• Try to structure your lyrics better from the beginning. Maybe my mistake was listening to Taylor Swift too much today, last year’s “Folklore” was on constant repet. She makes everything look easy.

“A Sea of Mountains”

February - Guarding the Spirits

Fourth Day, fourth song. When the idea for this song came during ten minutes in the warm winter mid-day sun, I had envisioned it much more aggressive and screamy. But of course, the time limitations just gave me enough wiggle room to produce it more like a straightforward blues shuffle.

And this is how it went down:

Around 12:45 p.m. - first idea. I had this intensive shuffle in mind, driving forward and then someone who is fighting and eventually accepting ghosts from the past. Seven hours to go, let the idea sink in.

8:00 p.m. - Sitting down to write the song. The initial lyric’s line “Guarding the Spirit I kept. But I ran out of spirits after the first chorus. Good inspiration: let’s cycle. The past, the now, the future. Most of the lyrics then flowed.

9:15 p.m. - recording. This one I produced a little different. To save time and grief I looped a lot. The guitar and the bass are both copy and pasted to make up the song. I cut out some slack in the middle where I had anticipated a guitar solo. I had two guitar tracks where I was able to overlap regions and record independently. The chorus was the hardest part to come up with and eventually turned out not my brightest piece of work.

10:00 p.m. - recording vocals. Huh, that turned out more difficult than I thought. I wanted a certain tone and timbre which somehow did not work out as planned. Maybe a better producer or sound technican would have saved the day. Well, I made it eventually.

11:00 p.m. - mixing. Difficult to balance.

11:15 p.m. - Mastering

What did I learn today?

Lesson 1: determine your desired key BEFORE recording. Turned out that A-major was not the best choice. The guitar was already done when I found out.