The Moment of Truth

This next song has been the longest in the making. I started recording it in 2002 and only finished it in 2010. I was satisfied with the instrumentation and arrangement but the original vocals left much to be desired. Originally I had sung the main vocal an octave lower that what you will hear in this version. I didn't like it. It sounded too laid back and wasn't a good match for the subject matter of the lyrics.

I worked on the instrument tracks for much of 2002 and 2003. I was very pleased with the music itself and definitely felt it was my best work up to then. Even to this day it remains one of my favourite songs and I really love the semi-psychedelic folk rock sound I created on it. Even a fellow musician of the reggae/rap genre had shown some interest in sampling the instrumental version for his own music. As far as I know, that never came to pass however.

The drums on this song sound very good to me just as on the previous song. The overall balance of sound and instruments is also very good.

I recorded multiple takes of the vocal track but none every sounded right. So for years I left the song alone until 2010 when I decided to try something different with it. What I tried was to sing the whole song an octave higher than originally planned. To me, that gave the song a much better sound and a sense of urgency that complemented the lyrics. It also made it much more difficult to sing the chorus without going flat. Nonetheless, I think it sounds great. And I added a falsetto harmony track on the verses. Icing on the cake!

Instrumentation includes: acoustic guitar; several electric guitar tracks; electric bass; drums, electronic keyboard (organ sound); and digital piano. The electric guitar used in this song was my very first electric. It was an Epiphone Les Paul Special which I no longer have. I don't have any pictures of it either.

Here is the song:




Since this is one of my personal favourite songs and one of the best sounding ones, I included this song in my 5-song EP which I released in November of 2011. This song can be found on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and various other music websites.

I never entered this song in any contest mainly because I stopped entering songwriting contests in the mid 2000's and this one was completed in 2010.

On my next post, I will have another one of my favourite songs. It's a song that also took on a life of its own for a while and some people can even sing some lines from its chorus even to this day.

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.