Yesterday, after I finished my post for the day, a habit that I’m trying to build after years of not sticking to writing every day, I got down to work on Seesaw.
It’s another habit I’m trying to build. Working daily on my own music, with the intent of making at least small steps in finsihing things. Not necessarily getting done with one song in a day (as some electronic musicians seem to have the habit of), but more like setting an achievable goal (every night) and achieving it.
So I’m quite proud to say that I finished the song as a draft production, and it has come out surprisingly well. This basically means it is yet another song that I could choose to professionally produce and release whenever I get around to doing it.
As usual, I shared the song with the three people that I share my works with, and all three had shared positive (varying levels of) feedback about it. The most positive one came from my ex-colleague, and hers felt more like how I had felt about the song. So I chatted with her a bit about the song and the whole creative process.
That’s when it struck me that I could write a blog post about the song, the process, and the habit that I’m trying to build. Here it goes.
Seesaw has been in my life for about 8 weeks. It was born on the day before my knee surgery. An idea had seemingly floated into my brain, inspiring me to grab the guitar to write a hook and record it on my phone.
I remember having checked out the recording after dinner at the hospital, before Jay would leave for the night. It still had it. It had me. It had the potential of being a catchy song that would easily find its place is my top 10 dance/pop discography.
I came back to it on the second week after surgery, when I was finding it difficult to sleep one night. By then the melody for the three parts of the song was set in my head, and it was easy to write lines of the right meter to fit it.
The next day I sang it for the first time, and it was a bit of a let-down because I wasn’t getting the poppy punch that I was hoping it would have, right out of the gate.
Cut forward three more weeks, and I was able to sit at my music work desk for a long enough duration to start working on my productions. Mind you, I had a good excuse to not work on this song. My pop bass was away with my bandmate, who was sub-bing for me during my recovery period.
Yet, somehow, picking up the bass that I generally use for thrash metal gigs out of storage, I started laying down the parts.
The guitars were simple. Clean Telecaster with middle-of-the-neck riffs with a lot of syncopation and muting. Drums were too. Straight up one-two kick and snare with hats. A pickup loop and claps for the chorus. Reverse cymbals for transitions.
Keys were more difficult. I needed some nice sounding pads and a gentle arpeggiator. Pads were a disaster and eventually went on mute. The arpeggiator was found after a few hits and misses. Then came the bass.
For producers/musicians out there, if you are wondering why I’m tacking bass the last before vocals, I really don’t have a good answer.
The best I can come up with is that when I lay down a bass groove after the other elements come in, it's almost like I’m jamming with a band, just like how I would in a real band. That seems to give me enough freedom to loop and come up with some bass line ideas, one of which will eventually make it to the song.
It wasn’t easy at all. Because of some damned pick-up, earthing noise I have at my desk with that bass. It was frustrating at best, and over the course of three days (not consecutive by any means), I had three versions of the bass line, each noisy in one way or the other.
Of these, the last one had manageable noise and was groovy enough for me to want to sing the song in the way that I had always imagined it. That’s how I had left the session three days ago.
So when I wrapped up my post here and opened the song session, I had no idea that it was that groovy. Also, before sitting down to write on the blog, I was jamming some songs on a new acoustic grand piano VST I had downloaded (Autograph Grand; thank you, Spitfire Audio).
Since I’m about a year into playing chords on keys (it means that not proficient at playing piano), I had to slow my chords down so that I made fewer mistakes, which also forced me to sing the same melody in diferent ways.
Finally, I had hit the right vocal texture for Seesaw. Then I tried the vocal texture on the guitar at the right speed, and it sounded good. So much so that I came up with a backup vocal hook that had the potential to fix my arrangement as well.
Voilà, in about an hour, I had done the vocal tracking and done the basic mixing. Then I did some more editing for getting the dynamics of the arrangement right and did a quick master, before cranking out a mix-down.
My first listen on my MacBook Pro speakers was a disaster. Terrible cut-through noise from the bass (instrument) over the bass (line). It had sounded so good on headphones and on the monitor speakers!
A couple of listens on some bluetooth earbuds eased my anxiety, and the song did sound great in the choruses, especially the second one, which had the new backup vocal hook glueing everything together.
By the time I was in bed, adrenaline was high, and I was expecting another night of difficulty in falling asleep. But I had some podcasts as lullabies and despite sleeping 2 hours later than my schedule, I did get a decent night of sleep.
So, after a terribly busy workday, featuring me doing a lot of re-reviewing things—because the original review’s comments were ignored—I was left with choosing to take a break from the new habit. I am tired. I was tired when I had the option of not sticking to the habit-forming habit.
I resisted. I went back to a song that I wanted to improve on. And I started the process. Before I had my dinner. That’s because I knew that I ought to give myself an early night of sleep.
So, here I am, after dinner, feeling the first waves of sleep, finishing this post, proud of having two habits with unbroken streaks.
Tomorrow will be a challenge because Jay and I are headed out to the country house over the weekend, after a late-evening physical therapy session. I do have to wake up real early and get my reading and exercise done before a whole workday and the evening shenanigans.
I’ll wish myself luck, but I’m fairly confident that I’ll keep the street intact, for I can choose to write for both. Maybe I can write about what I wrote for my second habit. We shall see tomorrow evening.
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