So exciting! Cat just wrote and recorded one of the most beautiful full length albums I ever heard, and the first song, Wind Blows Me Home, dropped today. We’ve been working diligently for weeks, every night and on weekends. Her voice and sense of harmony astound me so I didn’t want to disappoint. I learned as much as I could about vocal production. From manually dampening every harsh constant to putting side chain compression on music tracks with overlapping frequencies, I tried not to rely on one-size-fits-all AI effects, EQs, de-essors or compression. They’re icing on the cake after manually balancing the song one bar at a time, again and again.
I hope you like her song and voice as much as I do!
I admit, not all songs are worth salvaging. What feels inspiring one moment can soon feel dumb, insignificant, and lacking any meaning even by abstract standards. Certainly, this could be insecurity which I imagine all artists face. But if the sense perseveres after a few re-visits, I move on.
Conversely, some songs, no matter how old, gnaw at me if they remain unfinished or un-recorded. Such is the case with a song I wrote when I was 26 years old, then called Stormy Weather.
Naive, I had no idea there already was “a song” called Stormy Weather. A lot of the musician guys I knew at the time warned me. These guys played the same beach town bars as my band Moxie, their set lists comprised of white man blues. From Eric Clapton to the Allman Brothers, they’d slam through masturbatory pieces filled with maddening layers and endless solos. I found it interesting that they felt a need to comment on my song title. They never played anything original. My own band didn’t seem to care nor even notice.
Though it stayed as a core song of our set list for a year or so, Moxie never recorded Stormy Weather. Every spring since (that’s a LOT of springs!) the melody and lyrics swirled in my head. “Flowers bloom. Their perfume fills this bright and sunny day. Sparrows swoon, sing their tune and I feel so damn out of place”
I tried with my Tascam four track cassette recorder, then with my Adat 8 track. But I just couldn’t figure out how to capture the groove, the relationship between the drums & bass and guitar even though we had figured out a live song that I thought worked well.
Then last summer, with a few years of amateur sound engineering under my belt, I kind of figured it out. A couple of things happened. (I know, bad passive English sentence, but sometimes you have to relinquish control and let shit happen.)
First, I picked up a bass, hit record and just let LOOSE. It is by far my FAVORITE aspect of being a musician. Just closing my eyes, letting the beat move my body and fingers, feeling my eyeballs roll back into my head, escaping conscious thought. I don’t really play bass, but I guess I know enough from guitar where the notes are, and an obsession with dance music gives me a sense of what a bass can do. And this, a compelling bass line, as it turns out, was the crux.
So now, where to put this very busy, very groovy bass? Can I sing over it? I felt I should alternate, starting with a simple bass mirroring the guitar, then building. This called for an extended arrangement. A place to drop the bass line, and make it the focus, like so many house/EDM songs. So instead of the original song arrangement, a simple and short verse/bridge/chorus, verse/bridge chorus, I changed the structure to verse/bridge/musical interlude, verse bridge chorus, verse bridge chorus.
Well. This required a NEW verse. Imagine, 30 years after “finishing” this song, I need a new verse? All I can say, in my Long Island accent, is “like, how?”
By the time I had this realization, it was deep into April/May 2023. I had a new dog for the first time in quite a few years, and the park next to my building where I take little Barbie for walks burst with inspiration. Crocuses, daffodils, then tulips, magnolias and pink buds on tree ends expressed the genius of the NYC parks department and the under rated lush landscape of NY. After a few tries, I worked out something that I felt fit perfectly. The rhymes were tight as in the other verses; the stanzas painted a landscape and expressed contradictory emotions. “Leashes trail wagging tails. Yellow balls sail through the air. April paints a Monet. I remain a smudge of gray.”
Alas, it must have been late May by the time I was ready to record, and it wouldn’t make sense to finish and release it by June or July. I moved on to other music, vowing to circle back.
Help, I hope I’m not becoming a writer who can only reflect on the process of writing. Snore. Ok, I got this far, so…..
This past winter absorbed me in helping Cat record four full length LP’s but as soon as March rolled around and the tips of the crocuses poked through the earth, I told her I had to dedicate some time to this song.
I had the instrument parts, built the basic drum loops, the rest should be easy, right? Sigh. I sing. Singing is a verb, and I spend a lot of time and effort on this instrument. But I’m not a natural born, great singer. I’d love to pair this song with a great singer, but nobody’s knocking down my door (or returning my messages) to sing my songs, so girl’s gotta RISE to the occasion.
And this song….if you look at the notes…the half steps…the range…I imagine it’s a tough song for anyone to sing… I stumbled upon this production technique…called “stacking”…where you sing a PHRASE at a time, then sing it over four more times. You then align the phrases’ timing using some ingenious feature that probably all softwares have (I use Cubase). After this, the technique calls for auto-tuning EACH note. I’m not talking about running some AI auto-tune on the whole damn song. I mean EVERY SYLLABLE is broken down into piano looking notes, and if they’re a half step off (or if the program interprets it as off) or even 1/16th step off, you can adjust it. After hours and hours of grueling technical work, I achieved an in tune, albeit occasionally un-natural sounding vocal. Which I don’t care, I love dance music, and this is a pop song.
I then had to layer harmonies, align timing, and tune those tracks note by note. As you can imagine, this took incredible CHUNKS of time. And I have SEVERAL day jobs, so I can only do this nights and weekends. But I was NOT waiting another year to release it. I gave myself an April 1st deadline.
After auto-tuning EVERY note of every track, my ears got so sensitive that I was able to hear parts I missed; a single note buried in 8 vocal layers, whose pitch was off by 1/8th of a note. Next, the technique called for mixing up the effects on the different layers. Some tracks pan left, some pan right, some add effects/compression and pre-sets, others leave untouched except for maybe some EQ.
I get that some people might perceive this as cheating. Well, I wish they would convince Crystal Waters to sing my song. Until then, a girl’s gotta rise to the occasion. Stacking is also a well known, fairly common vocal production technique in EDM/Dance/Pop.
I also learned how to bring out the bass sound. I reinforced the simple parts with synth basses, but the complex parts are just me playing. It’s incredible what EQ tweaking can do, vintage compression, as well as “cassette tape” effect and virtual bass amps.
By the time March 31st rolled around I still hadn’t figured out the space before the second guitar riff. Maybe if i had a collaborator, or another 2 weeks I would be satisfied with these 4 bars. I settled for weird space savers, and a faux Led Zep snare build. I wish I could have dreamed up something better. And sure, there’s some other things in retrospect I wish I could change.
But more important than creating a perfect song, after 30 years, I RELEASED this song. And you know, how it came out, it may not be my best production, but it’s something that I can be kind of proud of.
I’ve heard advice from great writers. Just take your old projects and throw them out. If you haven’t finished them by now, you won’t. But I’m not so sure. I mean, it kind of feels dumb to finish something out of anxiety spurred by “unfinished” projects. As someone whose started countless books and abandoned them, I don’t really value following through for the sake of following through. However, as Tony made me aware, there’s a certain continuity of time, where past mixes with future and present. And if you still feel connected to something as if it was today or yesterday or tomorrow, then doesn’t it deserve an attempt to complete it? I don’t know if this song will ever reach anyone outside my 17 Spotify followers, or ever resonate with another human, which is always my hope. But regardless, I am now free of 30 years of longing (to finish this song) and open to what is new.
Wow, talk about scrambling to distribute your song in time. I uploaded this song to my distributor today, and it won’t get released until CHRISTMAS EVE!!! You can pre-save it on Spotify >>follow my Spotify artist account (visit link & click follow button) and you will get notified automatically when it drops.
Industry experts suggest choosing a release date at least 2 weeks in advance of uploading your track. This way music artists have a pre-release window where official stream service curators can review and add your list to an editorial playlist. I must say, after uploading a over 20 songs, only God’s God ever made it to a Spotify Editor playlist. Generally I ignore advice that has such low odds of fruition.
However, in this instance, I decided to give My Christmas Gift some lead time, despite the tug of instant gratification. I desperately tried to release it sooner, but today was my hard deadline. There’s this one fucking guitar note in the intro….that I hate….but I spent 2 days trying to correct it, and at a certain point, enough is enough. I can’t let one hateful note push the release to the 2024 holidays.
It took only about a day to write. If I remember correctly, I wrote it December 23rd, 2022 also with a hard deadline to finish by Christmas! I can’t say it was easy. I must have filled TWENTY PAGES with rambling lyrics. I’m still not sure how the song narrowed down so concisely. However, I was determined to write a holiday song like the countless classics that inspired me over the decades. Elegant & succinct, with vivid imagery. Since I spent 2023 busy recording and writing other songs, I put production on the back burner until now, the very next holiday season.
Production took 19 days, on the heels of the Ali Krieger release. Every night at 7 I sat in my bedroom studio. If I could, I started earlier on the weekends. I began production with the original guitar part and a click track. And absolutely no other plan.
Every song unwraps differently, and for this I decided to focus first on that click track. Usually the click track is a no brainer. You choose the best bpm for the song. Done. But by default the clicks have a 4/4 time signature to suit most popular music. For some odd reason, when I first wrote My Christmas Gift, it blurted out in 7 count. So now, as a producer, I had to determine the time signature. This turned out to be 7/4 (except for the last bar of each chorus, which are 8/4) An online tutorial showed how to drop the alternating time signatures in my software song project, and the click track naturally followed along.
Once I had that basic foundation, I recorded a “scratch” vocal which mostly wound up to be the keeper vocal track, go figure. Naturally from there, my wife recorded harmonies.
I can’t remember what came next, the bass or the drums, probably because the instruments are so interdependent. It took a degree of back and forth until they locked. I actually played the bass guitar on this, unlike some of my other songs where I use electronic instruments for the bass line. I must say, one of the purest joys in my life is grooving on the bass. It’s up there with fine food, sound sleep and tantric sex.
That bass solved a LOT of problems. Lately I’m of the belief as a general rule that THE BASS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INSTRUMENT in a song, next to vocals. It moves the song. I know, pretty bold statement for a guitar player, but my philosophy is a whole other post.
At this point, it sounded like a “production” that was unlike the original acoustic song. I listened morning and night, driving back and forth to work. I listened when I jogged. I constantly reminded myself that “not good enough” is not, well, good enough. In order to move forward, I had to pinpoint what part of the song i didn’t like, and force myself to articulate why. The chorus isn’t dramatic enough, the bottom falls out during the bridge, the rhythm falls apart there, the transition needs a flourish here, that passage doesn’t have magic, your voice warbles there, the bass came in late here. (not often, as it turns out) Of course, all of this came to me in increments, and each issue got solved in increments.
Gosh, this is such a LONG post. But to illustrate the challenges I had with this song, I’ll use the example of the Christmas bells. I decided after researching a bunch of holiday pop songs that some of the magic lie in the bells. Let me describe the wormhole of bells.
I assumed I could just find “sleigh bells” built in to my Cubase software. As it turns out, I had no such sample. So I looked online, and found purchasable sleigh bell samples for software OTHER than Cubase.
I decided to purchase a .wav sample for $2.99. It sounded like someone actually playing sleigh bells, shaking them in time for a 30 second stretch. I dragged the .wav into a track of the song, and it was completely out of time. I tried the AI quantize feature to no avail. I took a break. Cleared my head.
At some point this past year while watching random cubase videos, I came across a tutorial where you can build an entire drum kit made with your own samples. At the time, it was useless information. However, the day after my $2.99 sleigh bell purchase, during my commute, my brain dredged the video tutorial up. I vowed not to let myself get intimidated, and when I got home, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
I edited out one bell hit at a time, and put each jingle in a separate drum pad. Then I laid out the notes nice and neatly in the grid. However, would you believe it STILL sounded out of time? I determined it was because the volume of a jingle bell gradually peaks, whereas the drum hits were immediate. Thus in the song timeline, they didn’t sync. So i went back to my drum kit and chopped off the leading tail of the jingle bell waves. It worked when I dropped it in the grid!
Even though the bells were now in time, they still fought the rhythm instead of enhance. Welcome AI. Well, i guess AI has been around for a LONG time, and this Cubase calls this feature “automatic quantize” because it was around before everyone started packaging their automatic features under the moniker “artificial intelligence”.
Bingo. I was dancing in my chair.
If there is one constant formula to writing and/or producing music, it is this: There is always a large portion that is IMPROV and has NO formula. And so in some of those lulls, I had no idea how to fill it. But I saw an ad for an Amy Polar master class. She said something about missing the whole parade waiting for the perfect float that never comes. And a lot of the song went just like that.
For example, the bridge was like grabbing the elements of a passing parade. I decided to try some sort of guitar solo. I have this new young neighbor, beautiful and mysterious as she is sweet. When she first moved in, I saw an instrument case propped against the wall, which turned out to be her cello. In our brief introduction, she asked what I play and then told me how she also plays guitar, piano and harp. (I LOVE Alice Coltraine, i blurted, and she said she was currently listening to Alice!) Fast forward, a few days ago she left a couple of complicated music theory books in the hall outside of the garbage area for someone to take. The entire subject matter of the books focus on harmonies in the 4th interval. I flipped through, but couldn’t comprehend. One page called a progression “wrong” and another “correct”, but I didn’t have the time nor brain power to figure out why.
I found myself with a guitar on my lap, ready to add a layer to the bridge so googled the key, and “harmonies in the 4th”. I have NO idea if I did it correctly, but using this research I came up with a part I loved. And also came up with the bell notes of the bridge and end, which seems to harmonize with the guitar in such a way as to set off an apparition of notes that aren’t there. At least in my ears.
“My Christmas Gift” drops December 24th! Don’t miss a beat, do one or all of the following to make sure you’re notified! 1. Visit my Spotify AND click “follow” 2. Visit my pre-save page to sign up for a Spotify alert Not on Spotify? No problem! For other alerts 3. In the footer of any page on this website, sign up for my “Newsletter” 4. Follow my Instagram or FB music page.
Listen now on Spotify, or simply hit play below. Ali Krieger final mix
The sports poem has been an unofficial tradition of the NYC poetry scene since I began attending literary events some 30 years ago. I’ve sat through countless poetry readings over the years, and always loved how sports poems offered solace from the usual subjects of love, death and self reflection. Always by dudes, and almost always about baseball, the poems are as thrilling as the games that inspired them
Though mesmerized as an audience member, I never thought to write one. That is, until a few weeks ago, when the NY/NJ Gotham FC women’s soccer club made it to the national finals. This song focuses defender Ali Krieger, the captain of the team. Under her guidance, and during her year of retirement, they went on to win the championship!
As a former “fullback” and goalie, I can attest that sometimes the back line players are the unsung heroes of the game. The unsung deserve a song.
I want to thank my poet friends David Kirschenbaum and Tony Rubin for their inspiration in the sports poem arena as well as the athletes of Gotham FC for an incredible season! The musical influence is more obvious. I donned black concert tee shirts as a kid growing up in the Long Island suburbs, with bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa silk screened across the front. One weekend, my family visited my extended Brooklyn family. I brought In Through The Out Door, my seventh grade addiction, to play for my cousin. Unimpressed, Ingrid dropped the needle on her freshly released Sugar Hill Gang vinyl and the fabric of my very soul evolved. Rapper’s Delight turned my world upside down.
As for the production, I’m getting more comfortable working with loops, samples & beats. This might be my first song where I didn’t actually play guitar or bass. Well, I lied, I played the guitar but didn’t record it. I had to plunk out notes to create synth melody lines because my brain doesn’t think in “piano”. Kudos to my wife for her vocal coaching.
Back in 2020 I learned as I went when I recorded my solo album (*). My gosh, when I started, I didn’t even know how to visually zoom in and out on the tracks. It’s so fun to slide my hands around the computer keyboard now. It’s almost like playing a new instrument. As quick as I’ve become with the tech side of recording, I’m now tackling the next hurdle.
Mixing comprises this new frontier. What an entire other art form that is! I had great fun learning about how to mix vocals with this project. I used to think mixing meant adjusting the relative volume levels of all the tracks. Hahahahaha, this strikes me as naively funny now that I’m learning about EQ’s, pre-reverb, gain, manual compression and manual de-essing in addition to the usual effects. I’m ready to up my vocal post production game!
I released it to streaming services today, but it will take a week or so to propagate on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. You can hear it in its entirety here above.
Harrison to Wembly she makes opponents tremble Their tactics disassemble You eye the net That goal is yours Your cleat strikes the pleather and the football soars Yeah it flies like a bullet, but only in your mind In no time, Allie sends it past the midfield line Extinguishing your flare You throw your hands up in despair Instead of fist pump Your swagger drops into a slump Don’t be fooled by her smile & charismatic glow When she guards the 18 yard box, the goalie & the goal She’s diabolical, not so nice She’s faster than you and more precise She reacts before you even move Telepathic to what you think you’ll do There’s only one champion, while your eyes drip She holds her medal to her lips Your pain is real, how you wish it was you But only one team’s dreams ever come true
I created this blog post for the express purpose of submitting for review to WSQ “Unbearable Beings”. Marinating in the irony of upbeat house music, Fathom explores women’s demotion to sub human status by an unbearable government-Church pact. The song ends with visions of a violent mermaid uprising.
So excited to interview the powerful & poetic ShyGodwin female grunge punk band for the Loud Women organization in anticipation of their huge music festival in London this September. You can catch the interview live soon. Exact time & date TBA as we had to re-schedule our initial Sunday date.
