Autumn (The Recording)

Seeing how this blog is about my own musical endeavours I am now going to embark in the direction of uploading my own songs and recordings here. Another good reason for this slight change in direction is that I don't have any more tabs that fellow musicians want to see at this time.

One more reason for doing this is to just make my music available to anyone and everyone. Life is fragile and you never know what can happen. These are crazy times now more than ever. This can serve as part of my legacy. And some of these songs/recordings would never see the light of day otherwise.

So I'm going to start with the first real high-quality recording that I ever made. I mentioned this song in a previous post. It's "Autumn;" the sonnet that I turned into a song. I made several recordings of this song including some abbreviated demos dating back to I believe 1995. Regrettably, I did not document recording dates during those times so I cannot be certain of precise dates. The recording that is here on this post is the final one I made of this song and is from about 2001.

This was the first song I made on my new-at-the-time Boss BR-8 digital recording studio. It had 8 track recording capability and recorded onto Zip disks. And that did rather suck because Zip disks were expensive and had limited space. And his Boss machine only worked with the lesser-capacity disks which meant that if you were going to record on all 8 tracks the song could not be longer than about 6 minutes. In reality that meant about 1 song per disk. So yes it had its shortcomings but it offered a sound quality better than anything I had tried up until then.

The recording features both 6-string and 12-string acoustic guitar, a couple of electric guitar tracks, bass, drums, an electronic keyboard and a couple of vocal tracks. I believe that of these instruments the only one I still have is the 12-string guitar. The rest was sold or given away. The drums were not mine.




I was really excited when this song was completed. It took a long time to do so. There recording is not mastered because the BR-8 offered no mastering capabilities. It is just a mixdown of the tracks. But I have come a long way with my recording and production skills since then. As I continue to post my songs here--chronologically for the most part-- you will definitely be able to see the progress made over the years.

From time to time I do think about re-recording this song with some different arrangements. But the idea of redoing old songs is not something I'm really crazy about. I'd rather work on the new stuff at hand. Of course it can be a great project if I'm going through a spell of writer's block and there's nothing else to do.

On a side note, I'm glad I came across Soundcloud. I was looking for a stable website where I could upload my music and be able to embed it here and Soundcloud has turned out to be the best choice.

I'll be blogging here more often now and the posts will feature my songs and a little bit of history behind each one.

Autumn (A Sonnet)

Thought I would share a poem I wrote back in high school which I subsequently added music to and turned into a song. However, I have never been completely pleased with any recorded version of it and have intentions still of re-recording it to my liking.

Here is the poem, titled "Autumn":


Autumn is a time of long, chilly days
With grey skies and colored leaves all around
It's a time when we change our living ways
With all of the leaves flying to the ground

The squirrels are starting to store their food
And all of the trees are becoming bare
The weather leaves us all in a sad mood
And raking of leaves we all have to share

The harvests are ripe and ready to reap
They will be the final crops of the year
The piles of leaves down the street are quite steep
And the frightful sound of the wind we hear

Autumn's memories we'll keep when it's gone
Until the time of the new autumn's dawn.


The poem is a sonnet. It was an assignment for an English class. I actually wrote my first poem in 6th grade. I was in an 8th grade level reading class and there was a poetry contest. My contribution was titled "The Moon" and I actually won 2nd place if my memory serves me well. And for the life of me I cannot find a copy of this poem anywhere. I tend to save everything, yet I cannot find this one treasure. I remember that my entry was a very simple and unpretentious one. I wrote the words on a sheet of paper and drew and colored in a yellow moon in the background. That was it. And I won. That was my first confirmation that writing was one of the talents I was blessed with.

This poem, Autumn, I happened to also use in a Literature class in college. We had an assignment where we needed to present something to the entire class. So I read this poem aloud and then played my then-most recent recording of it to the class. Received pretty good feedback as well, as I did presented something wholly unique to the class.

I've never uploaded this song to YouTube so I can't add a link here. But maybe once I get around to it I will add a link to some audio so you can have an idea what it sounds like.