The dagger is there where you left it

ok. I am  back. I have recorded two malkmus/pavement covers but that is not for today.

You can download the track at http://tinyurl.com/6l6b28

here is a new song. called “the dagger is there where you left it”. I posted it over at the sonar message boards and its getting some nice reviews. mostly about the song title.

Subject Matter

It is a happy little ditty about child abuse  – or more specifically, the tendency for it to keep “coming back” to haunt/resurface in a victim’s life. I will not go into the motivation.  I will post the lyrics.

About the song

So some interesting things about this one. First. I am ridiculously happy with how this turned out. I rarely don’t like songs that make it all the way to completion, but some make me happier than others.

It is a “big” song sonically. There are a gazillion tracks and yeah some things get lost in the mix but it is not a mess like the last one.

Second, generally songs go their own way when I record because all the arrangements, drums, keys are all missing when I start. This one turned out exactly like I thought it would. I sounds the same as what was in my head before recording. that rarely happens.

And third, i can’t point to anything that influenced the song. generally I can say “sounds like pavement” or “sounds like sonic youth” or some other reference point. All i can say is “the cure? maybe?… if you squint?”

Song Title

as I said, this has gotten some good reviews over at the cakewalk forums. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE mentioned the title. I encapsulates the anger, bitterness, cynicism, sarcasm that the song voices. I am really happy (happy?) with the title and the line of the song it is from.

Songwriting

this started with the very simple guitar part (listen to the first part of verse one). That was it. I tuned up the Low E to F for this one (like the last song) so i guess it’s technically an alternate tuning song. I knew the verse part was in F but I didn’t really have any idea what I was playing. It’s based on the drone of A – E.  The chorus was completely by ear and just tooling around. I had no idea what I was playing until i started incorporating keyboards into it.

Turns out the verse is along the lines of F – C -Dm – A – G (sorta). The chorus changes keys. and I am kind of playing with chords with G D7 C Bm D A G Gm. In the chorus  the bass notes are generally not the root note of the chord (D – D – C – B  – D – Db B – Bm)

Recording

I started by laying down the primary guitars. Then a ton of midi tracks.  Vocals, then lead guitars and the “ohs” midi tracks. I did reuse the distorted guitar dropped an octave with trusty plugin. ( i will have to thank jim cooper of detholz.wordpress.com for suggesting NI guitar rig plugin). I am starting to use that almost exclusively. Used to be a amplitube guy myself.

The midi tracks use a couple of orchestra sounds, the trusty “guitar harmonic” sound which i am smitten with. I use several of the Oh’s sounds during the chorus and ended up using a couple of old school synth sounds as well.

vocals have verse tracks and chorus  tracks (they overlap) and the distorted vox and harmony vox tracks. I doubled the primary guitar, added another distorted guitar sparingly, and too leads for the near end section.

all in all, this is a good 30+ tracks.

Good decisions

I generally double track all my vocals. in this case when I did that, it was bad bad bad. Because in the chorus, certain notes are held for longish period of time, and i am not good enough to hold those notes in pitch… it sounded HORRIBLE. So I ditched the double. and yes, much better.

The build up

Biggest challenge was to create a convincing and non-boring build up at the start of the song. It goes a minute + before any singing. I am still working on it, actually. I am good with long songs but I have become more conscious that not everyone has my patience for my songs. Once it gets going it’s pretty efficient. I am attempting to get in a groove and then as it all just stops, and the singing begins over a single guitar part, the effect, if plan goes as planned, should be jarring. I really like the second stanza and the reintroduction of the pounding rhythm.

so all in all. a big song. I am happy. good song title. hope you like it. here are the lyrics:

do not turn to me and smile
like everything is fine
i will not play your child
no, not when the child is mine

when you had all the power
and my hands were bound with twine
I suffered it in silence
I will not hold my tongue this time

because i have not forgotten
what you cannot deny
when the dagger is there were you left it

i thought that this was over
thought that we had found our home
i thought we stopped the bleeding
thought that we had set the bone

so do not turn to me and smile
everything is fine
when the dagger is there were you left it

because i have not forgotten
what you cannot deny
when the dagger is there were you left it

a bitter taste

so this was going to be the “what a disaster this song was” post but I think I may have eecked out an ok song after all.

Download the song now!

A Little Background

The Historian: A Novel.

So I hate writing lyrics and really have nothing to say to anyone. So I decided to write songs about the books I was reading. In the past I have blogged about “closed circuit” and “break you down” — both songs in the series. (look for “a week in the always” shortly)

This song may have killed that project.

Enjoyable enough, the novel “The historian” was a vampire/dracula novel that was kinda like the “davinci code” for Vlad the Impaler. How do you write a convincing song about dracula? Well, I tried.

Music

The verses are in sets of three’s with each pass building. It’s in standard tuning (sort a). I tuned the low E up to F on this one. The verses are all anchored in A. Primary changes are between A and F by inverting two notes / fingers on the guitar. Then comes some diminished chords and a Dminor thown in. All still anchored by that A bass note.

Then comes the chorus which has my favorite chord to date (the second one). Something like a C#7, not really sure. There is a move between Fmaj and Dmaj and I emphasize the F -> F#. Then comes the second part of the chorus which is half step walk down from C with some math rock timing. — Did I mention this is a ridiculously ambitious song with a gazzillion different parts all working together?

after the chorus you got the RAWKIN Bam bam bam… bam. I did some noodling in there. I wanted it to be sloppy but ended up just sounding clunky so I added the two wailing guitars to distract from the clunkiness.

The ending goes on forever, but I like it. It builds to a really simply little melody that I thought called for repetition. I actually really like that part.

I also added a bunch of midi tracks. The two most important are the pianos. I did my little trick of panning two tracks and playing the three notes that make up the chords in different orders.

What doesn’t work…

The singing. It is beyond my capabilities. In fact, my only goal in the second attempt was to not mess up the vocals “too” bad. It was a challenge. The first attempt at this song, they were so so so bad. They ended up (not horrible) although I am way out of my comfort zone.

Maybe a sign of “bad songwriting” but I find that if something is not working, you can fix it by just layering X number of tracks on top of it. That is what I did at the end. I wanted a nice symphonic ending but it just kinda sucked! So I added guitar after guitar.

The final melody which is a simple one relying on some diminished notes, just wasn’t coming across. That was fixed when I added two distorted guitars with reverb to the end to emphasize the melody (one in each speaker). Although I was just making up for the lack on good arranging, it seemed to work.

I also tried to add this really dissonant in the section right before the second verse that just sounded stupid. (more on that in the what works part)

What works…

I still think after all, that given a gifted sound engineer and someone who could sing half decent, this could be a killer song! I really like the use of diminished chords. The melody (although challenging) is evocative. There are some nice moments. Overall, i am actually pretty pleased with the “song” despite the lyrics.

I like the build. I like the semi-abrupt changes, especially in the chorus. A couple of my failures, turned out to be successes. Two specifically. In the “bam bam bam bam” section (that would be the technical name) I layered a couple of guitar wails over the clunky noodling. which I think worked together really well. The dissonant part that I mentioned earlier. I buried it but you can still hear it. That, I think, turned out well. And even though it was due to serious throwing more and more tracks on, the ending works for me.

There are some odd timings thrown in (which required me to re-record the entire thing due to completely messing them up the first time).

In the end…What we have is a silly song, based on a silly novel that (like the novel) has some potential. There really are some elements that I truly love in this song, but it’s also too big for my little talent or recording skill.

Download the song now!

Hope you enjoy!

where would you go

Where Would You Go (aka Kebab Dylan does his best sparklehorse impersonation)Here is a new ditty that I just finished and am very happy with.

Download “Where Would You Go” Now

Songwriting

This song just kinda plopped out as I was writing trenches and warfare (see previous post). The opening chord is the first chord of the chorus of that song.

I was going for simplicity here which I normally don’t do. I wanted a quite moody song with just a very simple chord progression. The verses are just a walk down of four chords in standard 4/4 timing. Having said that, like other songs, this is in FACFAE tuning and I didn’t know “what” chords I was playing at first. It just sounded nice to me.

The element on the verse that I like the most is the chords blend into each other. Essentially it is F D# Dm C#. A pretty strange combination of chords. It’s held together and made to sound “normal” by the singing melody. The chord progression allowed me to hold notes that where shared by the following chord. IE (I would hold the “F” while transitioning from the C# back to the first chord F. Or hold the F while moving from the Dm to the C#.

The other trick is that the way I am playing them, the bass note for each chord is not the the primary chords note. (for instance, the base notes for the verses are actually C A# A G#)

The chorus took a little bit to knock out but from the get go I liked the dropping down a half step into it. Makes it both a new chord introduced but also a logical progression from the verse with its decending chords. The chorus is also some really strange chord combinations held together with the melody. (C Am Gm C# D# D Gm C# C).

The bridge was going to be instrumental and is the most conventional part of the song.

In the middle of the song, it turns from sleephead to sonic youth. I’m pleased with how the “loud” part is transitioned into. Although some of the “music” gets lost in the distortion, the base chords actually sound pretty good just on an acoustic guitar.

The Recording

With this song, I knew I wanted it to be quite and moody. The chords just called for it. I made a concerted effort to keep this song as simple as possible. I generally have never met an extra track (guitar or otherwise) that I have not liked, but I limited myself. There are three midi tracks. one is just a synth pad that smooths out things and two strings. The guitars consist of a double tracked rythem and one extra track that goes in and out. The mid section does pile on the guitars but its short lived.

I also added a bass guitar track (sort of) by using a pitch shifter and dropping it down an octive. I came up with the little bass line and I liked it a lot so I felt I should add it. I’ve been meaning to put bass in my songs for some time. I usually just use some deep midi instrument to fill that space.

To simplify it even more, the chorus consists mostly of one hit of each chord, leaving a lot of open space. The drum track also, I intentionally made very simple. As a result, I think the drums sound better than most of my recordings (my biggest weakness, according to many). I think I am getting better at mixing them to get a nicer more real sound. Still fake as can be, though.

I double tracked the vocals with one track slightly distored (a common trick of mine). and added one harmony part to some of it. I knew this song would be quiet so I went for the quite almost whisper singing style that I think works quite nicely with the whole feel of this song. I couldn’t stop thinking “this sounds like sparklehorse” the entire time and ended up embracing it. For those who are familiar with sparklehorse, you probably know what I mean.

Lyrics

I had a hell of a time with the lyrics. Hated Hated Hated them. I was going nowhere but I knew I wanted to record this song. When I first started working on this, “where would you go if you had to go” was stuck in my head and it made no sense. And it went no where. I then settled on “laughing like girls in the after noon with the blinds open wide”. Once again, made no sense and wasn’t going anywhere.

As you can guess now, this song is completely meaningless. Which leads me to one of my songwriting traits – lyrics. I rarely write “about something”. Almost never ever start off with anything in mind. I generally use images or sounds t evoke emotion that resonates with me (hopefully others as well) but without making any statements or getting personal.

With this song I was struggling through coming up with the words until the last verse where “where would you go” popped back up and I got an idea about what this song could be about. Think illict/illegal relationship at stuffy or religious boarding school in up new york state. I went back and added lyrics to the bridge to emphasis this kind of reading.

Download “Where Would You Go” Now

So I hope you enjoy this one.

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