First Gospel Song

Here is another song that would otherwise not see the light of day from a musical standpoint. I figure if I ever do become a paid recording artist or musician and I were to release the typical 'rarities' album that all artists now seem to have, this song would probably not even appear on there.

This is the first gospel song I wrote; 'gospel' being a generic term for any Bible based music. Just like "Autumn" before it, when I completed recording this song I thought it was quite an accomplishment and the greatest thing ever. Now, I can't really listen to it without cringing. Needless to say, I don't find myself listening to it often anymore.

I recorded this song in 2001 and though I was not going for a 'country' sound I realize that it does have elements of country music. I do enjoy country music from the 1950s through the early 1980s but I never really set to make any country-sounding music. I guess it's mainly the electric guitar parts that give the song a country flavour. Maybe the vocals, too.

The recording features a couple of electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, bass, drums, electronic keyboard (organ & piano sounds), tambourine and some vocal tracks. It was recorded with the Boss BR-8. Here it is.




I did enter this song in the 11th International Billboard Songwriting Contest and it placed in the top 1500 for which it received an honorable mention. I don't know how legitimate those contests were but I do have a few more awards I won over the years for some of the other songs I'll be posting here.

Unlike "Autumn" in my last post, I have never considered re-recording this song ever. This is one of those that will remain in the vaults of time and really only served as a stepping stone to much better things.

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.