PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase (Christmas song) Fly, Angel, Fly

YAYY! Noel is posting again! Great to see you back...especially with a Christmas song!

My first observation is about the confidence in your singing! When you first started posting several years ago, your singing was much more tentative... but this is strong, confident, and intonation is spot on... a remarkable voice! You are a guy who develops holistically. Some of us focus on one aspect of our delivery, but you have continually honed every aspect of your presentation... and you are SCARY good!

There are probably people who don't like Christmas carols in general, and specifically songs in which Jesus is mentioned.. but I'm not one of them. I totally buy into the theme you are developing here, and I appreciate that you haven't been intimidated out of writing it.

Knowing how much thought you put into your lyrics, I paid special attention to them... but I know there's no way I see all the subtle additions that you put in place for very specific reasons.. so I'm hoping you'll elaborate a little on your lyric writing decisions. The main thing I notice is your use of loose rhymes, which I suppose is done to keep a more natural choice of words (as opposed to forcing a better rhyme that ends up sounding contrived) Whether or not that was your intent, I did notice how easily the message flowed with common language.

What I listen for more than anything is the music. In my opinion, not all music that is theoretically correct sounds good. But as Floyd pointed out (and I agree) there are several things about this selection of real tracks that worked out a LOT better than one can expect from a simple generation of a set of chords. Either you got phenomenally lucky, or you put a lot of effort into finding snippets that really maximize the effect you're trying to get.

And then there are the tweaks.. it sounds to me as though there is good use of pushes throughout the song. One of the problems with automated compositions is the way all of the instruments uniformly follow the chord sheet. Pushes break that up and add what might be called "cadence dynamics" (I just made that up, so bear with me). Bottom line, you ended up with a very live sounding composition as a result of all the techniques you've used here.

Yeah, the bell... you GOTTA have a bell in a Christmas carol! But what's cool is that you have a good feel for "just enough". Each of the instruments flows in and out of the mix very transparently... I didn't consciously note that was happening. In fact, it's a challenge to use this many tracks without getting too busy, but you did an amazing job of keeping that quality of "just enough" at every point in the song.

The intro was also very nice.. it caught my attention right away and set my expectations for a very good listen

There's so much to say, but I may as well stop now that it's only three times too long. Four times too long is just unacceptable.

Thanks for coming back to please your friends with one more song! We've missed you!