Resisting the massive urge to re-sing all the out-of-tune parts, redo the awkward moments, and fill in all the gaps, I present a song I’ve finally gotten around to recording:
It took me most of last night and this morning to do it. I’m so sick of hearing it right now that I think it’ll be a couple of days before I can listen to it from a more objective perspective to see how it turned out. Since I desperately need to be doing work now, that’s probably a good thing.
I wrote the melody over a year ago, which is kind of indicative of the size of the mental backlog of songs I have. I need to spend a month recording these things, just to clear out my brain… (Also probably explains why the guitar part is overly ornate: I’d been playing it for too long to let go of those flourishes.)
As you might guess, the song is based partially on the view from my window, from which you can see part of Berkeley, the bay, Marin, about half of the Golden Gate Bridge, and, yes, stars. It’s actually an optimistic song, though barely. (There is one logical error in the song that I was almost anal enough to “fix”, but I restrained myself. I wonder if you can find it.)
I didn’t actually get to finish the song the way I wanted to. There were supposed to be more vocals (probably wordless) right before the chorus, among other things. I just got sick of recording. If I ever get a chance to redo this song, though, I’ve promised myself I’ll be more thorough :). Another weird thing is how different my voice sounds when I’m singing low and when I’m singing high. Sounds almost like two people. Of course, it doesn’t sound like that when I’m doing the singing, but when listening to the playback on my headphones, I find it a bit startling. It’s also kind of disappointing how coarse my voice is, especially when it’s low. Given another shot, I’d probably sing the verses in a higher register.
Also, it’s damn hard to play guitar for three and a half minutes without screwing up. I need to work on consistency a lot more.
The next song I want to record is going to be a lot heavier. In fact, the way I hear it now, there will be nary an acoustic guitar. Whether or not I get around to recording it all depends on whether I can un-laz-ify myself enough to go over to IHouse and record the drum part on the kit they have in the practice room. I guess I could use my sound card to generate the drums, but what’s the fun in that? :)
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