Re-working An Old Song

I have a really old song--I'm talking 2006 old--that I never satisfyingly recorded the final vocals for. I had complete lyrics for the song and recorded a few demo vocals. The vocals didn't come out well and I never went back to redo them. Subsequently, I never released the song, originally titled "All For You," and it has just been sitting there. Here is a clip of the song--specifically the bridge--that I put up on YouTube:




The complete song is actually about 5:20 long. I have been exploring some new possibilities with this track and I'm going to write some new lyrics for it. Additionally, I'm going to trim the song down about 2 minutes which means eliminating an extended chorus section, a guitar solo and the above bridge. I already came up with a few new lyrics and melody lines. When it's completed, I think this will end up being the 10th track for the album.

I had thought about including the Christmas song I made last month on the album, in the vein of The Band having their only Christmas song on the final album they put out with the original 5 members. I'm not sure though. I'd rather keep it separate. If this old song I'm reworking goes well I'll have a solid 10 songs with a total run time of over 40 minutes. Won't need anything else but I still may throw in the Christmas tune as a bonus track.

A Christmas Single

I like the 'old' practice of releasing singles with A sides and B sides and the special artwork that was featured on the covers. Not all singles had such artwork. Some just came in plain white sleeves or such. But some releases--such as the Beatles' singles--had unique artwork/photographs on the sleeves.

That was a pretty cool practice but who releases singles anymore? I know they used to release cd singles before but those things usually featured 4 to 6 songs on them and were aptly called 'maxi-singles' or something to that effect. And most of the songs were always different versions or mixes of the same one song. The radio version would be on there along with a remix by "DJ Kool" and another remix by "DJ Badass" among others. Pretty superfluous in my opinion. I realize a cd can hold about 80 minutes worth of music and it may be considered a waste to only have 2 songs on there. But then at least have a few other songs that the artist/band worked on themselves instead of the outsourced-to-dj versions.

The neat thing about the Beatles' singles was that all the ones they ever released were not part of any albums. So you had to buy both the singles and albums if you wanted to have all their music. Their reasoning was that they didn't want to sell the fans the same music twice. But I can only imagine how much better the already great "Revolver" album would have been with the "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" single on there!

Anyway my whole point in mentioning all this is that since I recorded 2 songs for this past Christmas it could be considered a single and I made a cover design for it. That is, were I to officially release it. Perhaps I actually will for Christmas 2014 in the early part of November. Well here is the official cover art for it:

There it is. I wish all the readers of this blog a most blessed and prosperous new year. And stay tuned for more music and updates!

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.

Christmas Songs - Final Versions

Merry Christmas, readers!

Yes, it's Christmas and here I am blogging. The reason being that I have made some better mixes and masters of my Christmas tunes and I want to get them up here before the day is up because many people will not want to hear holiday music anymore after Christmas. Funny though, because I continue to play Christmas music well into February. I don't like winter very much so playing Christmas music throughout the winter months makes the season more tolerable for me. Besides, many classic songs labelled as Christmas music make no mention of the holiday and are really just winter songs. That's my story. Well, let me get on with this because depending on where you're reading this it may not even be Christmas anymore!

I made a few tweaks here and there on both songs. Most of it will not be noticeable. But comparing my finished products to what I hear on albums just makes me yearn for better equipment and/or funding to have my music professionally polished up.

So here they are.





Hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them. Now off to working on my other goals for the remaining week of the year.