By Stephen Pate – I gave my girl the perfect Valentine. I wrote her a love song called “Your Song”, recorded it in my office using gear I had and wrote it on a lightscribe CD labeled ‘Valentines 2007 Your Song’.
She was non-plussed. Next I have to figure how to publish the song on this blog. If you know how to do that, leave a comment please.
The song is a pretty decent love song. I tried it out at Baba’s, Piazza Joe’s and Brennans and people like it. She loves it. A friend warned me not to play it again: his girlfriend was asking him to write one.
All of the recording was done on a Korg D1600MKII purchased two years ago. Every step of the process was a big learning curve since I hadn’t learned how to use the Korg. It’s an all-in-one recorder: 4 XLR inputs, 4 balanced inputs, 16 tracks, mixer, EQ, Fx, pre and post effects and CD recorder. The Korg has a touch screen but most of the command sets are pretty complex and referring to the manual is only partially helpful. Try that with a fever headache. Some things had to be done over and over until I got it right.
The plan started with a 6 day bout of the flu. Stuck in with no energy it seemed like the right time to make the CD. Over 3 days and without her noticing, I laid down the base track of synth guitar/strings and vocal. I intended to blog this day by day, like Pilgrim’s Progress; however, she read’s my blog.
For percussion, I tried brushes on a snare but it didn’t sound great. Guess my drumming skills are slack. I deleted the track. Bongos were perfect. I came up with a couple of cool harmonica licks that made the song sound airy. I did one track just with the synth strings. For an alternate guitar, I added a 12-fret steel string played in the open position. It didn’t sound great but I kept it for background rhythm. It was too much like the main guitar track.
Then I rememberd the lead guitar trick: play higher on the neck. The next guitar was my Martin D35 which has one of the best sounding guitars I have heard. Put on new strings, played it around the 8th fret and concentrated on lead licks which are not my specialty. However when the rhythm guitar track is there, it’s not that hard. I miked it using a Rode NT2-A and direct from pickup over two tracks. The mic track sounded dull for some reason but it added ambiance so I pushed up its fader in the mix.
The vocal was giving me no amount of grief. I’d forget words, changes, where to start. For a song I can play with my eyes closed, I had to resort to reading the lyrics again. Of five passes, the third was the keeper. During all that, Deeter sat on his gym and watched. He didn’t squawk once.
For monitoring the mix I used HD 280 Pro’s and my old keyboard amp a Roland KC300. Not quite monitors but it works. I played with panning left and right in the mix down, light EQ, and something called LA compression. Sometimes it sounded better: others it was worse. Probably because there were three guitars. That’s a lot of the same instrument. The mix needed headroom.
My office is small so I had to drag instruments in and out to do tracks, set them up and take them down again. Cables failed. While mastering, the left channel disappeared. Glitches abounded.
She was coming at 5 pm to go out for supper and I was still trying to make the lightscribe disk at 4:30 pm. A few things flew around the office. But it got done.
Boy was she pleased. What am I going to do next year to top that?
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