February - Imaginary Conversations

I am surely not superstitious, but number 13 was the most difficult so far. Tomorrow I need to simplify!

9:00 p.m. - Start writing the first bits of lyrics and music on my piano. Had this sort of unrequited love scenario in mind, the conversations you might have with someone unreachable in the imaginary circumstance that you are able to talk it out.

9:30 p.m. - Recording of piano and the drum sections. Adding the bass was fun, good sound, but messy. Vocals come quickly together, now that I know how to edit the second vocal track in pitch and timing. Made the cardinal mistake to make only shadow tracks instead of copying. Can’t do individual edits to the various track elements, some ugly timing issues are the consequence.

10:30 p.m. - Fine tuning starts. I play around with the layerings but are unable to create any tension for the refrain. Frustration! I end up by adding an ill-fitting drum loop from Apple’s repository. Added some vocal widenings. Worked fine but not really the best effect

11:30 p.m. - Started mixing. Tried to solve some of the timing issues but only got so far before time ran out.

12:05 a.m.- Mastering done. Another one in the can.

Learnings today:

• Copy instead of Alias for track regions! This will keep me in control of individual notes and errors, instead of the other way around.

• Simpler songs. Tomorrow I’ll go simplier from the get-go.

February - Burning Bridges

Ironically, though the song is called Burning Bridges, it has no bridge (Inside baseball singer songwriter joke).

9:30 p.m. - Studio time and no idea of a song in my head. But the chords come flowing quickly, as do the words.

10:00 p.m. - Piano track and rhythm loop are quickly done. I make the mistake to tinker with per-note editing, but without success. I have to simplify the piano part in the refrain to save time and nerves.

10:40 p.m. - double the vocals to make it more interesting, find some good bass layer

11:00 p.m. - Start getting creative with some other synth stuff to make the arrangement more interesting. But fail utterly, a lot of time lost in nothing Find one more layer synth and make it run through as simple as possible.

11:45 p.m. - Mixing

0:00 a.m. - Song is done.

Learnings:

Forget about arrangements, make simple songs and record them without bells and whistles

February - What Holds The World Together?

My wife asked me to compose a happier song. Done.

10:00 p.m. - Today I had my bi-weekly scifi writing group, so first contact with my One Day One Song challenge took until almost the end of the day. Scary: the whole song writing, including almost complete lyrics in one go took less than fifteen minutes.

10:15 p.m. - As it’s already late, I decided not to make this a band thing, just go for bare bones. The guitar track is a bit too playful and remains sketchy in many places. Good enough has its limits. The vocals had a bit of rehearsing to get the tone right. Third time runthrough was the good one.

10:45 p.m. - First listen with compressor, limiter and some EQ adjustments. There is something missing, some spice as both the guitar and the vocals are mono and centered (spell: boring). Did the piano tinkerings.

11:10 p.m - final mixing run. Final listen.

11:15 p.m. - Song done.

Today’s learnings:

Less itchy fingers when laying a base guitar track - it comes back to haunt you during mixing.

February - And Life Itself

Life indeed happens in the small things around you. And love, sun and life itself sounds like a good formula to me.

6:00 p.m. - No idea where my song ideas come from. It’s like pushing a button. Sitting down at six p.m. on my piano and the idea almost floats from the second my hands touch that initial A-Major chord. I had this conception of happiness in three everyday things. Love, for sure. The sun, makes me happy. And definitely life itself. Boom. And everything else I sing about in the verses is the life around us, the special, the mundane. But in the end, do you really need that? Happiness can be drawn from few items in life. No one will ask, but I tell it anyway, “the song that Joni sings” is of course any song by Joni Mitchell.

9:00 p.m. - Recording starts. Piano 8 bars for the verse, boom! Piano 10 bars for the chorus, done. The bridge,one take. Main recording was done by…

10:15 p.m. - The organ took a little longer to figure out but I could modulate with one of the keyboard wheels. Today a lot of vocal cleanup to eradicate clicks, hms, and hisses.

10:45 p.m. - First bounce. Background vocals to prominent. One more. Final listen.

11:00 p.m. - Song done.

Learnings today:

• Next song must a different key than A-Major. (But it fits my voice well)

• Better bass playing

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?