About three weeks ago, I wrote [A]bout this time last month, I had finished working on and recording a new song. I felt that I was out of ideas and that I'd never write another song (this happens quite frequently). After finishing "Blind as a bat", I felt this emptiness again for a few days but I knew that at some stage a new song would come. I was busy at the beginning of the week with meetings, but on Tuesday evening I managed to find some time to sit at the piano, and almost by magic a new tune appeared, that I recorded onto my mobile phone. I had decided in advance that I wanted a simple song in a minor key, to act as a contrast to some of the more complicated material that I have been writing lately, and this new tune did not disappoint.
In contrast to most of my songs, this one is almost completely diatonic: in the key of A minor, the chords are Am G | F | F Em | D | F | C | Dm | E | Am G | F | F Em | D | F | C | Dm | G | Dm | G G# dim. The only chromatic chord is the D in bars 4 and 12; the G# diminished chord at the end can be seen as E7 without the root, that leads seamlessly to the A minor chord. I was pleased by the fact that the 'chord rate' was not one chord per bar; there are bars with two chords and there is a chord that is held for one and a half bars. The song actually is very slow (66 bpm), leading me to suspect that each half bar is really a bar, meaning that the tempo would become 132 bpm. Due to this slow tempo, this simple song lasts over four minutes.
It wasn't until Thursday evening that I had the chance to transcribe the tune into the MIDI sequencer; apart from the tune itself and staccato chords, I added an extremely simple bass part and an arpeggiated part for a Rhodes piano. On Friday morning I finished my programming duties early and so was able to devote a few hours in developing the piece. The staccato chords were thrown out and the Rhodes part became the major accompaniment. I developed the bass part in the second verse, then added a few more parts. The biggest problem was deciding on which instrument was going to play the solo: originally I wanted a French horn, but this sounded too synthesizer-like. I tried a variety of instruments and it wasn't until this evening that I settled on a piano.
This is the second time that I am reading the book; I think that the first time around I got bored towards the end and never finished reading it, a rare event. The same thing happened with the tv series which became less and less interesting as it progressed.
I realised early on that A minor was too low a key for me to sing (the tune runs from G below middle C upto A above middle C); shifting it up to B minor seemed on paper to be sufficient but this was still too low for me to sing comfortably, so in the end I transposed the song once again to C# minor.
The vagaries of the phrasing made singing the song quite difficult, even though I had a comfortable key, and I ended up creating a composite vocal track of three different takes (basically each verse comes from a different take). I thought that this was hard enough, but mixing the track, or more accurately, obtaining the vocal sound that I wanted, required many different attempts until I found the settings that were not too bassy and were clear. Tomorrow I'll probably decide to change the equalisation settings once again.
Additional comments from a few days later: I'm going to rerecord the vocals as they should be more syncopated. Until I get the chance to do this (probably Friday or Saturday), I can also get more familiar with the tune, meaning that I'll sing it better. Certain lines should have been syncopated which again would improve the quality of the vocals. I've also changed a few lines in the words and I am mentally debating whether I should change the short instrumental link between the first two verses.
No comments:
Post a Comment