March 27, 2018  -  User Showcase Song - Bound for Freedom

Bound for Freedom: https://soundcloud.com/dcuny/bound-for-freedom

Technical Details
Strummed Guitars - Native Instruments, Strummed Acoustic 1 & 2
Bass - Drums on Demand, Essential Bass (loops)
Drums - EZ Drummer, Nashville Basic Brushes
Horns - Zero-G, Brass Elements (loops)
Sax Solo - Band in a Box, Sax, Tenor, Soloist PopCountryMark Ev 085 #2019

Vocal Processing - Waves Tune
Mastering - Ozone 7 Elements
Effects - EZMix
DAW - Reaper

Notes
As part of my personal songwriting challenge, I'm working on incorporating various cool things that I've bought, but never gotten around to using, into my songs. This time, I started with the EZDrummer Nashville Brush kit - lovely sounds! I added the Session Guitars to that, which are my current go-to toy. As usual, I built the bass line using Essential Bass loops. It's probably not the best way to get things done, but I like the level of control. Then I went searching through my hard drive and found Zero-G Brass Elements loops, and went to town with those. Probably way too much horn, but whatever. Horns are cool. I tried adding some other horn elements using Session Horns, but it was sort of blah. Maybe next time.

Backing tracks completed, I worked out a melody, which I thought was fairly nice, but verse and chorus are a probably a bit too similar too each other. My daughter concurs, saying the song "sounds the same" all the way through. I thinned out the vocal on the verses, and went with a big harmony sounds, but it's still an issue. Lesson learned. I left a big hole in the middle to drop in a guitar solo from BiaB, and got to work on the lyrics. Speaking of lessons learned, did I bother to check the range of the song this time around? Of course not!
I'm not David Snyder, so writing lyrics ended up taking about a week. Since the song has a sort of bluesy Gospel sort of feel, I went in that direction and ended up with a song about the Underground Railroad. When it came time to fill in the bridge with an instrumental, I couldn't find any guitar solo that worked. I finally hit on the second to the last Sax soloist. The first solo one out of gate fit perfectly. The vocals are obviously a bit lower than usual - it's a comfortable range, but it tends to be a bit "tubby" and harder to carve out space in the mix for. My son's friend wondered how I got that cool distorted sound on the vocal. Turns out gain staging isn't something I excel at. Sorry about that. The ReLife plugin helped recover it a bit.

As always, feedback of any sort if appreciated.

Original forum post: http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=464113

Posted on March 27, 2018 10:12 AM