Sunday, June 19, 2005

Why Say Goodbye?

Jet lag from my return from China is easing up a bit each day. I didn't wake up until 5 AM this morning. The sun was actually almost starting to come up. The fog outside cleared up over the next hour while the fog in my head was mostly cleared up. Major jet lag is wacky.

I fired up Sonar 4 this morning. Loaded up a song I've been working on during the past year. Messed with it some more and then mixed it. Right now it's called Why Say Goodbye. Doesn't have any vocals yet. I also added song links on the right hand column of this website. From now on you'll find all the songs I reference ---> over there. Was losing track of them before. This gives me a place to put songs as I'm working on them.

There's another track without lyrics over there. It's currently called Change Your Mind. Both of these tunes will need to have vocals to actually be complete songs, but I thought it would be fun to get more "work in progress" stuff posted. For some reason, a lot of songs I write start with the music beforing having any lyrics. This might be totally abnormal. I'm not sure. It doesn't always work that way for me.

Ok, so what's the deal with Why Say Goodbye? Well, it's me playing all the guitar parts. My Parker Custom Fly through a Boss GT-3 pedal. Some of the guitars are then being processed a bit through the Trash plug-in. The drums and percussion are all loops. The bass is chopped up loops. The organ is even from loops. Lots of chopped up loops. I mixed through Ozone with an overall EQ setting I sampled from More Than A Feeling by Boston. Ozone has this unique feature for matching the master EQ from another recording. Leave me a comment if you have questions about this.

I like getting a song to this stage so that then I can listen to it a bunch of times and think more about the arrangement. This song needs about 5 more re-writes before it will be ready to record for real. It's needs to be more epic with a bigger build up at the end. Of course I'll want a bunch of harmony guitars. It may also need a dramatic quiet section. AND some hand claps! ...and Brad Delp singing.

Now I have to drive over to my old studio. I have some equipment still there and the place is being sold. eBay will be getting some old recording gear soon! I kept it all these years (more than 15 years) because I didn't want to say...goodbye.