Alright, I said I would, so here we are. Yes, I sing. Badly. And recording is hard. And I’m a guitarist - drums are hard. But, I’m still proud of this. I see its potential. I’ll put on the ‘keep for now’ pile. A work in progress.
(And then I’ll buy a paid version of Ableton Live that gives me more than 8 tracks!)
Instrumental track here (I get it. My voice is, erm, unrefined!)
It’s actually quite strange that this would be the first recorded music in my solo project. That’s because when I set down to record this one, I had intended it to be the intro instrumental song. All I had going in was what turned out to be the solo. In fact, I included the solo at the end of this post - what I called my potential ‘theme song’ at the time.
I started with that, which I thought could be adapted to the solo, then wrote the rest of the guitar parts. Then I programmed and looped the drum beats, then the synth beat, then bass. Somehow, it had turned into a slowish punk song with a simple verse-chorus-solo-repeat structure. Something simple to make you move (?)
I wrote the lyrics and melody on christmas day, in about 10 minutes at my kitchen table. Funny how that happens. But honestly, I’ve always written songs and poems at christmas. It’s a way to cognitively process the absurdity of the shared cultural hallucination, a thought that led me to the first line.
The lyrics are mostly about how I felt in those 10 minutes, but broadly the song is about the kinds of acts we have to sustain just to get by. It took me about 5 days to write and record it, working on it for 2 or 3 hours per day (and probably thinking about it for an additional 5 hours per day!)
There are very few effects and essentially no mixing and mastering. There’s a bit of overdrive on one guitar and wah on the other guitar. There are noise filters. I used all of my 8 tracks. The drums, vocals and guitars are double-tracked (just two separate takes of the same parts with slightly different levels and filters), leaving one track for bass and one for my korg volca. There are mistakes that I didn’t punch in or out. Obviously, learning the recording a process is still ongoing….
It’s hard for me to hit the ‘publish’ button on this one. It’s not fully refined, but it is what I have to start with for now… watch this space. It’s 2024, dammit!
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