My Christmas Gift

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.