Day 20: Snowed in and taking stock

 So with 10 days left to go, here's what I have done:

- Valuation: a lovely piano/voice ballad that I think I'll leave alone. I'd planned on making it more of rock ballad but it sounds nice as is. Maybe I'll add stuff if I have time.

- Every Corner (formally Where She Keeps It): a cool, atmospheric full band song with a quirky structure. It is well mixed right now I think.

- Exchange: The title track for the "hit." I have a solid acoustic guitar and drum groove and I have a melody in my head. This needs lyrics and vocals and some more instrumentation to fill it out.

- Pick and Choose: The funky guitar track is cut and rearranged into a song structure. It needs an arrangement, lyrics, vocals, and mixing.

- Tree: I don't know what to do with this. It is a problem child. I like the idea but it needs another idea, and maybe a complete re-recording.

- Low Interest: this is just a nice electric piano riff in 7/8 but it's a little sloppy and maybe can't become anything serious.

So that's 3 solid songs (though one still needs its vocals and filler) plus 3 partial songs which are still just ideas.

I have a lot of time today to add some things. I think I can get Exchange done, make Pick and Choose into something good, and maybe start a new one. That will leave me with 5 good ones (assuming today's new one will be good) and 2 ideas to play with. That's 7 total so I can cross the finish line with some pride.

Update: I didn't do all the things I wanted to do on Day 20, but here's a snippet of Pick and Choose:

rbstansfield · Pick and Choose (snippet 1)

Thanks to my friend Glenn for the electric upright bass. I'm not an upright bassist but I can pretend for a couple weeks, right?

Vocal Processing: Crafting a signature vocal sound for the album

I want all the vocals on this album to have a distinct sound that's different from my basic Hostess Mostess sound. Now that I have a few vocal tracks recorded, I'm going to try to find a good processing chain that makes a sound I like that I've never tried before.

I'll come back to edit this post as I work on the sound. Here's the chain I'm building:

1. Recording Setup: Use my Sure SM58beta with a pop filter and a lot of headroom. Sing about 1" away from the head and aim directly at it or off-axis by 30 degrees or less.
2. Mix Bus: Run all vocal tracks that do the same thing (lead vox with doubled vox, background vox acting together) into common audio busses. This lets me pan vocals into the bus, then process the vocals together as one common stereo track.
   
3. Clip Gain: Hand smooth each track to even out loud and soft spots. Use automation lines and splitting the tracks into pieces. This can be time-intensive so do a rough job first and listen a lot to find the ugly spots, then refine just those.
4. Subtractive EQ: This I need to experiment with. Do I do it on individual tracks or on the bus? Find the frequencies that stink and pick some frequency space that the vocals will own in every mix.
5. Compression: find the right attack-release settings to keep the dynamics smooth without losing the transients of the consonants. This might have to be applied to each track, not to the common bus.
   
6. Saturation: Find an amp setting that adds some overdrive to some frequency range. I rarely do this to vocals so let's try it. Possibly split the chain and add different types to mix together?
7. Secret Sauce: find something I like (flange, chorus, reverse-reverb, stereo delay with a gate-limit, etc.) and make this the secret sauce for all the songs.
   
8. Add Room Sound: Use an aux send to add delay and reverb so I can automate the levels throughout the songs. Try to make every song sound like it was recorded in the same space.

So hopefully at the end I'll have a signal chain that defines the sound of the album vocals to make a coherent and distinctive sound. Wish me luck!

 

Day 13: We Haz Vox!

 Last night I got some vocals done!

Full lyrics and lead vocals are done for two songs: Valuation and Where She Keeps It (which I think will be renamed, not sure what yet). And some vocals are added to Tree. These are both kind of releasable as is (after some good mixing) but I'll want to add tracks to both to fill in some gaps and add some countermelodies here and there.

Tree is becoming kind of a headache: what I've done so far feels like the introduction to a much longer song but I'm not sure what should come next or how to go about making it happen. I'll have to ponder it while I do some yardwork today.

So I need to start 4 more songs. Let's review what I have and see what I need:

1) Slow, atmospheric, cool song (Where She Keeps It)

2) Moderate piano ballad (Valuation)

3) Pensive, percussion-heavy long, drawn-out moody (Tree)

4) I need something peppy and danceable (think The 1975 "Girls")

5) I need something hard and biting (think The Beatles "Taxman")

6) I need something soft and lonely (think Shawn Colvin's "If I Were Brave")

7) I need something quirky and fun (not sure what that feels like yet)

So maybe today I'll try to write a riff for #5 and some sort of groove for #4.

Almost halfway there!

Day 11: Lyrics and Melody

I'm spending some time with the draft mixes I have, noodling out some melody and lyrics ideas in my head as I go about my day. This is my favorite part of songwriting. I like to sing through an idea a bunch of times, then wait a few hours doing something else before coming back and trying to sing it again. If I can remember it, it was catchy. If not, it wasn't. A self-limiting hook-writing process! A genetic algorithm that relies entirely on my own amusement.

The goal is to record vocals this weekend. I'll have the house to myself for a few hours here and there.

Another bit of news: I asked the hosts at Funkwhale's Open.Audio pod for account permission. If they grant it, I'll use that space instead of SoundCloud to host the bits and likely to host the final product.

I'm not sure how strict they are about granting accounts. We shall see!

Day 10: 3 decent songs started

 So I missed a few days because of life. But I did do some music every day in some form or another. Here's the status:

- Tree: a meditative, percussion-heavy idea that needs some fleshing out and probably needs to be longer.

- Where She Keeps It: a slow and lovely A-B-A-B-A-B form that deserves some interesting vocal harmonies. Probably needs a "rock out" section as well.

- Valuation: a piano-based ballad that lends itself easily to a clean vocal and some fuzzy guitars. I've been listening to '80s Journey a bit recently and it shows here.

I will do a bunch of vocal recording over the weekend and add a couple more song ideas to this list. I'm on track to have a 7 song album ready by the end of the month if I can keep up the pace.

Here's how "Where She Keeps It" is sounding right now:

rbstansfield · DRAFT01 - WhereSheKeepsIt

It needs some cleaning and a little punch-up. It needs bass. It needs vocals. More to come!

Day 5: Mix-a-lot

I was busy with life so I never got around to recording any new sounds. I did however find an hour to clean up the "Tree" track and get it sounding better. I won't post a clip yet, but I do now have a mix that I can play on repeat while my brain finds some vocal hooks to try out.

Once I have a decent plan for this song I can start writing more in whatever vein it proves to be. Ideally I'll end up with 5 to 8 songs that I can bundle together as an album. Right now I have the beginnings of two songs and a pretty cool guitar riff I can work with.

Onward!

Day 4: More Drumming!

 My wife was away for the day and my daughter had school so I allowed myself to bang on the drums like it was the boss' head 'cause you know that I don't want to work yadda yadda.

Actually I do want to work and I did quite a bit, but I managed to add some more drum tracks to both the "Tree" track and the new "Where She Placed It" (or whatever I'm calling it) track. I played along with the chopped up drum loop bits I had copy/pasted together in Ardour a couple days ago. That's a good sound and it gives a better feel to the songs.

So now I need to start to play those over and over for myself to find a good melody or lyric hook to justify their existence. Until I do that, it's all just noodles. But I think it won't be too hard.

On my mind though is this: am I just hurrying to get songs written so I have a bunch that I can call an album by the end or am I allowing myself the time to polish them up and practice them and maybe re-record them after they are written more fully? I guess I'll get a better sense sometime next week. Either I'll have some good ideas I can polish or I'm still pasting random ideas together.

No clips today. I'll post a clip when I have something more interesting.

P.S. What am I going to do on Thanksgiving?