Musical progress

All the work on doctoral research has naturally taken time and mental strength away from one of my other hobbies, namely music. Whilst I often listen to music while working on the research proposal, I haven't been creating any music. I worked on a song of mine called 'Most of these days' during December and completed an arrangement but somehow never got around to recording the vocals.

I decided to remedy this the other day and got set up for recording. After the first take, I discovered that my computer - or more accurately, one of the fans - is making a relatively large amount of noise which was being picked up by the microphone. I tried using the 'noise removal' function of my mixing program but this wasn't successful.

I realised that I could record vocals on my mobile computer - but I wasn't able to install my old copy of the multi-tracking program that I use under Windows 8. After scratching my head for a bit, I saw that I had Audacity installed on the mobile; it took some time for me to figure out how I could both play back the music and record vocals at the same time (there is a setting that enables this but I had to search for it).

After recording a few takes, I copied the vocal files to my disk-on-key and thence to my main computer for tuning, editing and mixing. To my surprise, the vocal track was out of sync with the music on my computer; this was easily fixed but I wonder how this happened. After playing with the equalisation, I obtained a vocal sound which went well with the music.

The computer was set up on the kitchen table next to an open window; the recording picked up no small amount of bird song. At first, I was tempted to edit this out, but after a while, I realised that the birds added a nice amount of realism to the vocal. This 'effect' is mainly heard in the first verse which has fairly sparse accompaniment, but it's also heard in the second verse.

So now I have two songs ready and waiting to go, along with several 'bonus' tracks. Unfortunately, I haven't written a complete song in about two and a half years, although the lesson of the song festival held in December is that I can easily write a tune, provided that I have a text. Writing the words these days is extremely difficult as I don't know what to write about.

In December, I started writing English words to one of the songs which I composed. Whilst the first four lines were quite interesting, the next four were rather naff. The opening was based on a dream which I actually had.

I dreamed of walking with the Queen 

She asked how my exams had been 

She gave ideas to follow up 

She held my hand and wished me luck

I'd be quite pleased if she would tell me how to differentiate between aims and objectives, although I'd be prepared to settle for another sixteen lines of lyrics.

[SO: 3542; 2,12,31

MPP: 376; 0,0,5]