Two months ago, I wrote about starting a new song. I worked diligently on this during spare time and eventually completed an arrangement. The third version of this finished with a section that is based on the Andalusian cadence; this suggested itself to me after the Phrygian portions of the song (especially during the 'middle eight' - actually eight bars of instrumental and eight bars of singing). But I used a twist on the casdence as I will explain below.
Earlier in the year I had been sequencing the Van der Graaf Generator song "My room (waiting for wonderland)" and although this does not feature the Andalusian cadence in full, it's very similar. What also is interesting about this song is that the verse features an odd rhythm that I wrote about two years ago: one bar of 4/4, one of 2/4, then two bars of 4/4. As it happens, David Bennett uploaded a video a few days ago about songs that are in 14/4 time; although I consider this to be a somewhat artificial time signature, it does describes the rhythm in 'My room', and thus the rhythm in the coda of my new song. I mapped the Andalusian cadence onto this rhythmic structure, with the second chord having only two beats. Maybe the non-musical amongst you won't notice this. What follows below is more for my benefit that for anything else.
The music was written on 4 February but the words arrived only three weeks later. I decided that I have written enough sad songs and that it is time for something more uplifting, hence the title 'Wonderful days'. This phrase appears right at the end of the song; indeed, until that moment, I was wondering what the song would be called. I spent most of Saturday 11 March trying to record vocals to the song and not really succeeding. It doesn't help that the tune is awkward - the first line starts on a C#, the second line starts on D and the third line on D# - and that there are many words to each line. The lyricist in me is annoyed with the musician in me who insists on writing such complicated vocal lines.
That initial 'recording session', whilst not being successful, did at least clarify a few things. The song was originally written in the key of A but even then I knew that this was far too high for my vocal range. For several weeeks, the song was lowered to E, making its highest note C, an octave above middle C, and its lowest note Ab, four semitones below middle C (this is not a recognised male vocal range; it's somewhere between a high tenor and an alto). The recordings showed that I could reach the high note but not the low note, so I had to transpose the song up to the key of F# - a key with six sharps, should I have written the sheet music out (I could also call this Gb, in which case there would be six flats in the key signature). As the second chord in the tune is now F# augumented, the first note on this chord should be called C double sharp (i.e. C# augumented) - but this doesn't really make any difference to me or to the MIDI sequencer.
Once I could sing the song, I found that I also had great difficulty in producing a good vocal track; the tone of my voice seemed to change from line to line. I couldn't find good settings for reverb and eq, and also couldn't decide whether to have the vocals in mono or in fake double tracking. I decided to leave recording the vocals for later, although as the middle section was good (including the highest note that is now D, an octave and two semitones above middle C), I kept this short passage. I'm fairly sure that I reached that D without any mechanical help.
In the mean time, I discovered that Audacity, the 'free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software', has the ability to make a continuous change to the tempo and/or pitch of a selection within a music file (this is confusingly called a 'sliding stretch'), so I used this to slow down the ending of the coda. Now that I know how to do this, I may use it to speed up parts of songs without affecting the pitch; Reason (or, at least the old version that I have) does not allow changes in tempo whatsoever.
It is now the first day of the Passover holiday; I had promised myself that I would work on this song during the holiday. So this morning I set up the microphone, briefly warmed up my voice - then sang the entire song with the same quiet tone throughout! One take. Processing the vocal track was also straight-forward, as was the mixing (this was partially due to my previous work). So after two hours of problem free work, I completed this song.
Now all I have to do is write words for the two songs that I had completed prior to this one but are still lacking words. Only then will I be able to record them. I also have a few covers of songs that I want to record (or rerecord) vocals for, so maybe I'll work on these for the time being.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 125 | The night of the long knives | Redundancies, Downsizing | |
| 165 | 06/04/2009 | Dave Stewart/Barbara Gaskin - Green and Blue | Richard Thompson, Peter Hammill, Randy Newman, Jackson Browne, Canterbury sound |
| 347 | 06/04/2011 | Green MBA | MBA |
| 565 | 06/04/2013 | Back to blogging | DBA, Jewish holidays, Cooking, Mobile phone |
| 1208 | 06/04/2019 | Maybe I'm doing it wrong | multi-track |
| 1305 | 06/04/2020 | Days of Corona (3) | Personal, Psychology, John Le Carre, Covid-19 |
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