Its a bit enlightening looking back over my recent submissions to see where my song-writing naturally settles subject-matter-wise.
And this one is no different. It was a very frustrating experience until I threw away all the technology and went back to basics. I'll write a bit about the frustrations below. Meanwhile here's my entry for this summer's Bare Bone's comp, a straightforward love song blues written from the perspective of dead people. I hope you like it
http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=13404480The Bare Bones of our LoveThere was a time when we were young
Touching your skin was like caressing the sun
We’d offer our flesh to the gods up above
But now we’re stripped right down to the bare bones of our love.
There was a time, the angels wept
When I kissed your lips as you slept
But I see vultures, darling, I don’t see turtle doves
They’re circling round the bare bones of our love.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
Lower us down and forget about us
But I’ll always remember you and I as one
When all that’s left are the bare bones of our love.
You’re dead and gone. I’m dead and gone.
Deep underground but when it’s all said and done
We’re still together just like we were up above
Everything has crumbled but the bare bones of our love.
There was a you, there was a me
There was an us, and we will always be
Dancing together, somewhere up above
We’ll never lose the bare bones of our love
The frustrations mentioned above...
As you know everything I do is already "bare bones" anyway, so I thought I'd flip things around this time and write a song about bare bones, but with a massive full on production. Very early on I knew it was going to be a blues and I figured on a Stevie Ray Vaughan style Texas blues with loads of over-driven electric guitar solos as I've never had chance to do that here. Alas, I discovered very quickly that I had no idea how to get a drum loop (assuming I could even find one) into my cut down (free) Sonar X1 LE DAW. I'd have had the same problem with bass, too.
No worries, Plan B would work - I have an old copy of Band in a Box from about ten years ago. I loaded it up, and although most tracks sound a bit naff, the Doctor John style was pretty neat. It worked for my blues song, too. It wouldn't be so much Stevie Ray Vaughan as Jimmy Vaughan. But that's not bad. I actually prefer Jimmy, and I adore Doctor John.
I worked up the BIAB file, played and sang along. Yep, that'll work. But then discovered that I couldn't get a WAV file (to import into SONAR) out of BIAB. The VSC add-in that I used to use on my last PC won't work with Windows 10. Loads of surfing the net, failed installations, and trying different things all to no avail.
Sigh.
Then... brain-wave! I can export the midi data. Surely I must be able to import that into SONAR, allocate some sounds and be on my way to the top.
Yes, no and no.
Managed to import the data and I could see it playing in SONAR, but no sounds. The "help" (ha!) files were useless, YouTube videos didn't help, and hours more of my life rolled slowly by. Cut a very long story short I eventually found the little settings box I needed to check, which I duly checked, and lo and behold... sound!
Now we're cooking.
No we're not.
Discovered that although I could find the screen that allowed me to set different instruments to my midi data nothing actually changed. Ah well, the actual settings that SONAR had defaulted too weren't bad - the bass was being played on a piano, but
c'est la vie. I could up the bass in the EQ afterwards and no-one would notice...
So I set about singing and playing and recording on top of the midi track. Man it sounded awesome. The phone went at one point and I was sure it was going to be Michael Eavis talking about a Pyramid slot for 2017. Nope, it was someone selling PPI.
And then I discovered that whenever I played and sang along with my midi tracks the start point of the recording was different to the start point of the midi track(s). It sounded correct as I did it, but it recorded it all wrong - the midi track was about 5 seconds behind the recording.
At this point, days into the project, I just deleted the lot, picked up my acoustic guitar and went back to bare bones. As you'll hear, I did record a whole load of acoustic guitars (about 4, IIRC) just to try and stick vaguely to my original idea of doing the opposite of my normal 1+1. But I must say I have a new found admiration for all you folks who can do all this sampling, midi, looping thing. I'm sure I could figure it out, but I'm not sure I have the time or inclination to do so. It would be like learning a new instrument, and I'm still trying to master the one I've got.
Hey ho. I hope my post and/or the song haven't bored you!
Derek
