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!

Break You Down: The 2 Mixes

I have a pretty sparse recording setup. A 4 year old PC, Sonar + fruity loops and plug-ins, cheapo mic, two guitars and a keyboard. I tend to multitrack until my system completely croaks. I like doubling parts and panning them wide on each side. I double almost all my vocals (that’s what people who can’t sing do).

Listen & Download Break You Down (Zengomi Mix)

 

Listen & Download Break You Down (Original Mix)

Writing songs is one thing. Recording them is another. Mixing the song once all tracks are recorded is another. In short, mixing is the hardest most time consuming part of the process. Add to that, once i start adding plug-in effects: compressing vocals, reverb, and a ton of amplifier simulations, my poor process gets pegged at 100% and everything stalls and then eventually dies. This makes the difficult task of mixing even more difficult and really really frustrating.

I generally mix, listen, adjust (without effects), listen, adjust… It takes good 15-20 minutes to compile the song into a wav file, so it takes a while.

Which leads me to this song. I have an acquaintance over in japan who goes by the name of zengomi. He uses sonar. So I bundled up the project and delivered it to him via FTP. (About 500MB file!) and he gave mixing it a shot. He has more experience and know how than me and I thought it would be interesting to see how it turned out.

In short: really really good. But not just that, what he was hearing was so much different than what I was hearing. Here are my observations about the two mixes.

Keyboards: my insecurities are not his. The two things that are most present in his mix that are completely buried in mine are the keyboards and vocals. I am a guitar player that dabbles in keyboards. I usually use them to bolster the low end (in lieu of not having a bass). I sometime copy the primary melodies. Often just create a blanket of sound that resides underneath the mix. But Z took the accordion like sounding keyboard and made it the focus of the musical intro.

This really more than just boosting keyboard parts. This song, to me, was a Guitar song. The main thing was the guitar part. That was the center of it. The opening has a melody played on guitar that was the beginning of the songwriting process. the seed. It is mostly buried and the keyboard part (that was an augmentation of the guitar part) is now the center of attention.

Vocals: Once again, my insecurities are not his. The vocals are much more present than I am comfortable with. He also emphasized the falsetto part which i would NEVER have done. Originally, the falsetto part was sung terribly (yes even worse than the current version). I had to re-track that part and send him the wav files).

About the Song

The song is based on the book “The Magus”. Its part of a project i started in attempt to write a song based on every book I read (regardless of the quality of the book, but more on that another day). It’s written also in FACFAE immediately after finishing closed circuit. Like the book, it is almost a love song, but a very twisted one at that. The book is ex termly confusing as the villain (or father figure?) basically destroys a man’s grasp of reality by using a couple of young twins to play mind games on him. Julie is one of the twins who at different times pretends to be a ghost, and actress, a schizophrenic, as well as a trapped unwilling participant in the mind games of the book.

Musically, the song is pretty straightforward. Nothing particularly special. The outro though is all pretty much on chord with a guitar melody that builds. It was written on guitar and pretty much sounds the same as the record version. I did not really add any extra parts, just emphasized what was already there in the guitar part.

So have a listen to both mixes. I still like both for different reasons .

Listen & Download Break You Down (Zengomi Mix)

 

Listen & Download Break You Down (Original Mix)

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