Music
I love writing and recording music. I have loved it since middle school - maybe even earlier. It started with playing around on my grandmother's organ. I got my first guitar from my aunt for my 15th birthday, and it became an obsession. My pursuit of music has been a hobby, a creative outlet, and a great social activity. I was recently polishing up a song that I recorded, and I decided to share it here. Along with it is a breakdown of all the little thoughts and accidents that go into the creative and technical process of getting a musical idea into a distributable format. If you're not a musician, hopefully you can let the music-nerd bits wash over you while you get a peek behind the curtain.
Wandering into Awesome (a.k.a. Lightning Strikes) #
Creating a song, for me, usually starts with spending time noodling on the guitar. It's not the only way that it starts, but it is the "normal" way. I'll be practicing scales or arpeggios or some technique that I'm terrible at, and then something catches my ear when I least expect it. I kind of go, "Hmmm...What was that?" Then I play it again. And again. And again. Usually I end up putting the guitar away and trying to remember the idea the next day. If I remember it, it's worth exploring more. Even then, most times it's not. Sometimes I can't remember the idea exactly, but in the process of trying to remember, something else comes out, and I like it more. Rarely, there's an idea that's so strong or natural that the structure of a mostly-formed song reveals itself in a single sitting. That's what I call a "lightning strike." The same thing sometimes happens with respect to lyrics or melody - often in the middle of a shower that I then rush to get out of...seriously. More times than not, ideas marinate for a long time. Sometimes months or years - even decades - go by before the idea becomes recognizable as a song.
I have found that when I'm in a band that's meeting regularly, the creative fountain tends to flow a little more freely. I don't know if it's a supply/demand thing or if it's just being in a groove and playing music more. Whatever it is, it is helpful for my productivity and makes the process of bringing ideas to life much more fun.
About This Song #
The song that I'm sharing here is called Everything Must Go. The lyrics are about how things must change with time and how some people are selfish and starved for attention. The musical themes are a mash-up of several ideas that go as far back as the early '00s. I'll point them out in the breakdown below. Every instrument that you hear in the recording is either played or programmed by me. I say "programmed" because, as much as I have tried to be a drummer over the years, I am not good enough to play what I want to hear. As such, the drums are MIDI. The song was recorded using Reaper (free/cheap DAW). All the plugins that you hear were free. Everything was captured and mixed in my basement.
So you know: I am far from a virtuoso musician. I don't even like my singing voice at all. I'm also not a great recording engineer. Nonetheless, I work with what I have, and it suits my needs. Without further ado, here is the song for you to listen to. It won't be the worst song you've ever heard, but I won't be offended (at all) if it's not your cup of tea. Below the recording you can read all of the details by timestamp.
Breakdown:
0:00 - Just an intro to build suspense. Don't listen too hard or it sounds like OAR.
0:06 - The main guitar riff was born from trying to learn hybrid picking to add a little more country flair to my tool belt. Country style often uses 6ths, so that's what you hear. The chromatic walk-up and the hammer-on from open A string are what give the funky/rock feel. The tone is my Texmex Strat with a humbucker in the bridge position directly into my Ceriatone C-Wreck and a modified Epiphone Valve Junior. It took forever to figure out a melody to sing on this, but I wanted it to start with something unexpected, hence the falsetto slide up for a first impression. The drums in verse 1 are inspired by one of the coolest grooves I've ever heard. It was played spontaneously by Matt Vincent while figuring out a song I wrote for our band, Modu, back around 2002. (I love the way the drums sound in that song. They were recorded by our bassist, Dave Wetherby.)
0:16 - This higher riff is borrowed from a song I wrote previously with my band, No Name Kicker.
0:26 - This ascending chromatic idea was a completely separate song idea that I incorporated just while futzing with ideas. This often happens when I'm trying to string together a whole song. Things get mashed up.
0:33 - The goal was tight harmonies. I was particularly pleased with this result.
0:38 - The lick at the heart of this chorus has been rattling around for nearly 25 years. I tried to make a song of it back in the early 00s with the aforementioned Modu. It never worked. I've since tried it out in many, many songs and it never worked until now. The lick itself is actually a little hard to discern under everything else, but it was inspired by Incubus's Drive. The melody of the chorus just kind of happened, but when it did, I wasn't happy with the range. It was either too low to bring the energy I want in a chorus or too high for me to sing fully. So I ended up just having both octaves in there. This wasn't necessarily the sound I was shooting for, but I was happy with the way it went.
0:58 - The beauty of the key of this song on guitar is that it gives you all of the open strings to play with for hammer-ons and pull-offs to and from all over the neck. The key is basically D (A mixolydian if you want to get technical), so you get frets 0, 2, and 4 across strings 3, 4, and 5 (think F#m pentatonic, position #1). This lick is exactly those notes pulled off in succession with a little chromaticism and a 6th at the end.
1:01 - I wanted something a little whimsical to give some space going into the second verse after the relative heaviness of the chorus.
1:11 - The guitar tones change a bit here to have a PRS Santana SE (shorter scale + humbuckers) playing the main riff on the left and a more rhythmic part up high on the right. The tone of the right side was inspired by Gwen Stefani's Sweet Escape - lots of compression.
1:31 - Here I introduced the B3 organ to add a little energy to the pre-chorus. There's also a really subtle Rhodes under that. I have always loved the way these sounds enhance the soul of guitar-driven songs. It's like you walked into church and the choir joined in.
2:03 - This is another lick that has been hanging out under my fingers for decades. This section is designed to build a little tension to release going into the next bridge. The swell in the organ at the end is the peak of the tension. I wanted it to feel like you're jumping off a cliff and the guitar line of quasi-chaotic descending 6ths is the fall.
2:13 - I love writing bridges. I don't know why. It's just satisfying to throw in a new theme that catches a listener off guard and hopefully makes them smile. In this case I went with a latin feel and a guitar solo. The underlying chords are simple: Bm, G, D/F#. The voicings are borrowed from either Dave Matthews' Tripping Billies or Collective Soul's World I Know (take your pick, they're the same). If you listen really hard you might hear the song's opening theme (0:00) played up high on the acoustic guitar. There's also a "cabasa" track in there that is actually just me rubbing my hands together really close to a condenser mic.
2:34 - You'll start to hear the electric guitar creep in here doubling the solo. This was mainly done to build the intensity and add the sustain that you hear with the whammy bar on the last note that hangs on with the organ.
2:43 - The claps are real. I recorded a bunch of tracks of myself over and over.
2:51 - The guitar that creeps in playing the 7 chord up high is my Strat on the neck pickup going through the same two amps as before. The sound was captured by a condenser mic about 10 feet away facing away from the amps.
3:08 - I wanted something unexpected before the couple of familiar choruses that take you to the end. So I grabbed an out-of-key major 7 chord that resolves to the relative minor of the key (F#m for A mixolydian). I wanted it to evoke a little jazz for no real good reason except to keep things interesting.
3:16 - In this chorus I introduced a new guitar line with the same tone described at 2:51. The riff, to me, sounds a little like F.N.T. by Semisonic. It's the same chords as the rest of the instruments played as spread triads a la Eric Johnson.
3:32 - I brought in an octave'd double-stop guitar "solo" (it's not really a solo). The idea was to add some intensity as we reach the end. The vocal improv you hear in the background is another example of actually capturing the sound with a mic that was physically far away.
3:54 - The end. I like that the guitar octave part ends on the 7th. It wasn't intentional. It's just where things landed. It kind of feels like resignation to me.
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