Pieces of Our Hearts
You and me
with pieces of our hearts
that won't fit right
we always seem to fight
every night it's just the same thing
can't forget or forgive

I thought you'd see
the only thing I want
is me and you
Why's that so hard to do?
I would never have guessed
this is all we'd have left

Like the dark skies before the frozen rain (dark skies, frozen rain)
Or a moth to the flame (we are drawn to the flame, to the flame)
We keep travelling on this empty road (I set my eyes on a new road)
Nothing ventured or gained (I'll set my sights for Jerusalem)

Seems to me
all we really know (all I know)
is not to let go (not let go)
We won't let it go (don't let me go)

Only dark skies (dark skies)
and endless pouring rain (bring endless rain)
Nothing ventured or gained (nothing gained)

The lights are fading at the end of the show (lights fade at the end of the show)
like a dying fire's glow (the fire's dying glow)

If you will be the one to catch me
I'll be the one who lets go

I've spent all this time (I've been waiting)
waiting for a love (waiting for a love, a love)
who would make his heart my home (who is my home)
After all this time (all this time)
and all this love we shared (all we shared)
why do we feel alone? (why do we feel, feel alone)

You and me (you, me)
with pieces of our hearts (pieces of our hearts)
that won't fit right (won't fit right)


The Band
Style is _CEDAR.STY (Cedar Woodblock Acoustic Praise)
RealTracks in style: 1255:Bass, Electric, PopShiningA-B Ev 120
RealTracks in style: 1277:Piano, Acoustic, Rhythm PopUpliftA-B Ev16 120
RealTracks in style: ~405:Guitar, Acoustic, Strumming Ev 120
RealTracks in song: 3443:Guitar, Electric, Soloist BritPsycFunky Ev16 100
RealTracks in song: 2500:Guitar, Baritone Electric, Rhythm PopCountryBrent Ev 120 (CustomFX)
RealTracks in song: ~1677:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking CountryBrent Ev 120
RealDrums [in style:PraiseWorshipShine-01-SCHt,SRCy [Multi]

Vocals: Synthesizer V, Eleanor Forte (Lite)

The Effects Chain
Vocals: Greg Wells VoiceCentric, Raum reverb
Bass: Blockfish, BootEQ Mk II
Drums: Sunset Sound Studio (Live Room), Scheps Omni Channel Strip
Strummed Guitar: Scheps Omni Channel Strip
Lead Guitar: Scheps Omni Channel Strip, JS Tremolo
Electric Guitar: JS Tremolo
Piano: BlockFish, ReaEQ
Master: Sunset Sound Studio (Live Room), Ozone Imager 2, Lurssen Mastering Console

The Blah Blah Blah Part
This song started out _CEDAR Demo. In retrospect, it probably wasn't a good idea to use a drumkit with so much percussion without having some control over it, but whatever. Lesson learned?

The goals I had for the song was to use the female Synthesizer V vocalist on the lead, and to leave more room for a guitar solo.

I applied the standard "add more major 7th chords" process to the original chord progression, along with some minor-ish segments. A major 7th section was added for the guitar solo.

I rendered a backing track in BiaB and exported it to Synthesizer V and in the piano roll mode entered a bunch of notes until I had something resembling a melody.

Then I started trying to fill in the notes with words, which was a long and meandering process.

I've been watching The Republic of Doyle, and there was the line along the lines of "Life's too short to live with someone who hates you.", which was probably the genesis for the of the song. It certainly wasn't a straight-forward process. Lyric writing for me rarely is.

The theme of "letting go" seems to be popping up in my lyrics lately. Sorry for repeating myself, but I'm just happy to have any lyrics.

Eventually, the lyrics got filled in. One nice thing about using synthetic voices is that it's easy to go back and change lyrics. There were a lot of rewrites, especially once I'd actually honed in the idea. The counter-line was written along the way, with a lot of back-and-forth between the original lyrics.

In doing the mix, there was a bit of duplication between instruments. For example, the piano and strummed guitar basically served the same function, as did the arpeggiated 12 string and electric guitars. The basic mix was pretty easy to do, but then my son worked on it, and it got overly compressed.

I had trouble getting enough "punch" out of the drums until I used the Sunset Sound Studio "Live Room" setting to put it an actual space. I also added the same effect to the master buss to try to glue everything together.

Some of the Synthesizer V voicebanks are "trained" to emulate the pitch variations of an actual singer. The Eleanor Forte (Lite) voicebank doesn't have that option yet, but he Saki AI (Lite) does. So I swapped the voice to the Saki AI (Lite) voice, applied the "Auto Tuning" option, and then switched back to the original Eleanor Forte (Lite) voice. The effect was pretty subtle, but it seemed to work pretty well. There were some places where the result sounded glitchy, so I edited or removed those segments.

I didn't to too much tweaking of the vocal beyond that, but I did have to do a bit of work to make sure the pronunciation was as clear as the phoneme set would allows.

Based on feedback on prior songs, I've bumped the volume of the bass a bit. The drums are also fairly loud - perhaps they need to come down a bit. Feel free to let me know what you think of the mix.

As always, comments of any sort are welcome. smile

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?