New Song Finally Finished! (Almost)

Started recording "Call On Me" back in December of 2012. I'm finally at the point (I believe so anyway) that I just have to mix and master the song now. I am considering re-recording a couple of guitar parts that feature the Leslie speaker sound. I'm not 100% sure if I will but it's pretty minor stuff regardless. So here is the mix/master I came up with as of last night:





I'm actually pretty happy with the sound. Everything can be clearly heard. Drums sound pretty good. I am however planning to move the background vocals during the choruses to either side instead of in the middle as they are in this version. And I may give the electric bass a little boost in volume.

For anyone who may be interested, I played an Epiphone Les Paul for all the electric guitar parts through a Fender Super Sonic stack, a Fender J-bass and a Yamaha S90 for the Rhodes sound.

My inspiration for this song was actually The Bee Gees. I was going through a time where I was listening to their early songs and checking out all their late 60's and early 70's videos on YouTube. I was just messing around on guitar and trying to come up with a melody over the guitar chords and some of the words just started flowing out. After I had the main theme of the song I started writing the lyrics to match. And then I spent way too long on recording it. Truth is I abandoned it for a long, long time and didn't finish it up. I had spent a lot of time on (Doesn't That) Blow Your Mind and you might say I was creatively exhausted. Excuses, excuses. I pretty much blew off 2013 but in all honesty I did some a pretty good reason. As I look through my recording log book--which I'm not very consistent with keeping up to date--I see that all of 2013 is blank except for nearly the very last month, which is when I managed to cut those 2 Christmas recordings. So it wasn't a complete waste. Pending all things possible, I promise myself to make 2014 a much more productive year. I Already have this song done. "Already". LOL. Album will be on the way as soon as I finish up recording one last song and go back and remix some of the others.

But for now I want to enjoy all the work I put into "Call On Me." If anyone should happen to give it a listen (Bootsy) I hope it sounds like music to your ears. I'll be back in the studio tonight tweaking and making adjustments.

Fixing Up Bass

Well, I thought I was done with "It's Christmas" but I'm just not satisfied with it. Two days ago I rerecorded a portion of the guitar solo to overlay on the existing solo. There were some muffled notes so I recorded a crisper sounding part. And last night I decided to take the bass track and do some bass boosting on the weaker sounding notes with the help of the Audacity program. It's such a painstaking process but if you want something to sound professionally done than you must put in the time and effort. If it comes out sounding great it will be worth it. I have yet to take this new and improved bass track and add it to the song. I will work on that tonight.

One new technique that I will be implementing in future recordings is to record the drums on 2 separate tracks. I usually record drums with only 2 mic's--I have very limited space where I record--even though I have a 4-piece drum mic set. In the past I've used that mic set along with an overhead when I recorded elsewhere, before I had a drum set. Now at home I record exclusively with only 2 mic's; one for the bass drum and one overhead. Not only do I not have the space to set up 5 or 6 mic's on the drums but I also only have 4 mic stands at this time. But I have found that I can get a really good overall drum set sound with only 2 mic's, and my proof for that is the drum track on "(Doesn't That) Blow Your Mind." The drums on that song sound excellent IMO and has been the best recorded drum sound I ever achieved up to this point. But of course there's always room for improvement. So by recording the drums onto 2 separate tracks--bass mic on one, overhead on the other--I can tweak each individually and then blend the 2 onto a single track. By isolating the bass onto one track I can boost the high's a bit in order to hear the snap better. And with the overhead I can cut the mid's and high's without affecting the bass drum. There may even be other tweaks I can do to get the overall drum set sound better. And then combine the 2 tracks onto one great sounding track!

Doing this adds more work to the project of course. And I guess the reason I've never really done this is due to fear of a loss of valuable tracks being available. But that's really not a real problem because as I have already written, I can bounce the multiple tracks onto a single one. I will start doing this with my next song which will be........not sure at this point.

I hope to be able to post the new and improved FINAL version of "It's Christmas" sometime tomorrow. I know Christmas 2013 is behind us but to me it's still Christmas and I continue to listen to holiday music and am actually in the mood to create some more original tunes for the season. Not only is Christmas music awesome but one great song alone can set you up for financial freedom. Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" earns him between $400,000 and $600,000 each year! Which means that since the song is from 1979 he's possibly as much as $15,000,000 over the years from it. I may in fact start off 2014 with a seasonal song I wrote some years ago and never recorded. I just want to set the tone for this coming year in terms of  devoting a lot more time to creating and recording new music and creating some sort of financial stability at the very least as a result of it.

And on a final note, today is the 29th and I still have not finished up "Call On Me." It's still possible for me to finish it up and release the album within the next few days. However I may be scrapping my plans to put out the album this year. It's really late in the year to release anything more than a song. But I do believe I will release it very early in 2014 and it will feature 10 tracks with perhaps a bonus track of my Christmas song.