The Lonely One

what do I say
when my world's gone grey?
what do i do now?

i look back and see how it used to be
our summer of merry-go-rounds
just you and me in the shade of the tree
watching the sun going down

i don't know, please tell me where to go now

   it don't seem that better days are coming back again
   when all of the leaves and dreams scatter away

   the days grow short
   and i am helpless as a rabbit on the run
   my world is small and sad
   i'm the lonely one

what do i say when you're far away
leaving me empty and down

why can't you see it's killing me
knowing you don't want me round?

didn't you see when you set me free
i'd fallen and crashed to the ground

i don't know, please tell me where to go now

   my broken heart and fallen tears won't bring you back again
   i prayed its not true but you will never return

   shadows grow long and cold
   i'm feeling like my life has come undone
   my world is small and sad
   i'm the lonely one

   my world is small and sad
   because that i'm the only one

Tracks FX
Lead Vocal: GW VoiceCentric (Natural Lead), Al Schmitt (Modern Vocal)
Backing Vocals: Vocal Rider, Curves AQ Stereo, Al Schmitt (Modern Vocal)
Backing Vocal FX: Abbey Road Plates (Warm Vocal), ReaEQ (low shelf)
Bass: EZMix3 (Californian 1x15 Bass), Curves AQ Stereo (Bass Guitar), Curves Equator Stereo
Electric Piano: TrackSpacer (ducking lead vocals), Finisher Retro (CEO Chorus), ReaEQ (Notch)
String Quartet: Curves AQ Stereo (Strings [Ensemble]), Curves Equator Stereo, TrackSpacer (ducking lead vocal), UADx SoundCity Studios (Ballad Strings)
Oboe: UADx SoundCity Studios (Toronto Strings)
Guitars: No effects, because I forgot about them!


BiaB Instruments
1827:Bass, Electric, PopModernGrooveA-B Ev16 075
1728:Piano, Acoustic, Rhythm PopBalladJohn Ev 085
1680:Guitar, 12-String Acoustic, Fingerpicking Ev 085
2051:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking CountryBrent Ev 085
~365:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking Ev 085
2916:Guitar, Acoustic, Rhythm CountryFolk8thsBrent Ev 085
2916:Guitar, Acoustic, Rhythm CountryFolk8thsBrent Ev 085
~2503:Piano, Acoustic, HeldChords 085
Electric Piano: Who knows? There's a track, but

Other Instruments
Lead Vocal: SynthesizerV (An Xiao)
Backing Vocals: SynthesizerV (Liam, Qing Su 2)
Drums: EZDrummer3 (Singer-Songwriter [The Acoustic Indie Kit])
Sine Player: Berlin Woodwinds (Oboe)


Short Version
It's another song. Feel free to comment if you want.

Feel free to skip the "Long Version", because life is short. smile


LongVersion
Thanks to Dan Simmons and floyd jane on this one.

On his last song, Dan had used Suno to create the final track, and I'd asked how closely Suno copied the vocals. My motivation was partly to see if I could feed SynthV vocals into Suno.

Dan was happy to oblige. But instead of giving him an existing song, I figured I'd just put together a quick dummy song and see what happened with that.

Naturally, things snowballed out of control from there, though no fault of Dan. wink

As usual, I first found a backing style I liked in BiaB - DELICAT. Simple and pretty. My prior songs had been loud and upbeat, so I figured I'd choose something a bit different.

I changed some chords, and created a backing track. Nothing fancy, just some stuff I thought would be pretty. I hadn't done a sleepy ballad in a while, and this was definitely going to be in that style. Because this was just intended to be a dummy song, I just worked as quickly as I could. What would the song be about? A broken heart, of course.

I thought it was a pretty melody, but (as usual for me), not a compelling chorus. Oh, well... this was just a throw away song, right?

Normally, I'll use a female SynthV voice for something like this, but I'd been considering singing the vocal myself (Spoiler: Once again, I didn't), so I picked a male vocalist. I'd purchased An Xiao a while back, but he had too much of an accent to use. The updated version with the last release of SynthV was much improved, and he seemed a good match for the style.

Slow songs are a bit difficult for SynthV, especially when it's low key. Although the vocal is clearly synthetic, I thought it turned out well.

I worked as fast as I could, putting in as many cliches as I could. Since I often write songs about how the narrator feels - they literally say stuff like "I feel sad", because songwriting is the opposite of "show, don't tell" - I thought I'd try adding details like:

   you could always find me
   by the old oak tree

This turned out not to be a great idea. Dummy lyrics are sort of like stains: they're tough to remove once they're in the song.

Halfway through the write, it occured to me that the narrator was busy telling his ex-love how much he wanted her back, without a thought to whether *she* wanted him. And that was getting into creepy stalker guy territory. So I decided to make the second half as a sad acceptance of his fate.

Pretty much full-on sad country song lyrics.

Since the song was 85 BPM and I had a lot of notes in it, there wasn't room for a bridge or even an instrumental. That's OK, only a couple of people were going to hear it. Did I mention the chorus was weak? Too late to rewrite it now! I used the ending of the chorus - it's a bit long to be a chorus, but whatever - to close it off. There didn't seem to be a good place to put in a modulation, but if I asked Dan, you know he'd tell me there's always room for a modulation or three.

There were some places that were resistant to getting lyrics added to them, but I pulled another late-night writing session, and just after 2:00 all the "la"s had been replaced by real, genuine words.

Not necessarily good words, but good enough words. wink

Of course, I had to add harmonies, just because. Suno would no doubt ignore them, but so what? If I ended up using my own vocals, it would be good to have something to distract the listener. Despite the fact that I only use harmony in a few places, I typically will create a harmony for the entire song, because that gives more options.

Once that was done, I could move on to mixing it. I ended up exported a whole bunch of guitar tracks, but mostly only used bits and pieces. It's also got a pair of hard-panned guitar tracks, because it sounds pretty. Weirdly enough, I didn't use the original guitar track, either.

That got me a basic mix, so I sent it off to Dan, who sent back a handful of Sunu "covers". They weren't exact covers, but they were quite good. Suno took a number of liberties, and made the chorus big, which was the opposite of what I had in mind.

I probably should have stopped there, but by then I'd invested a lot into the song, so I was going to see it through to the bitter end. I asked floyd jane if he could give it a critical listen, and he graciously provided quite a lot of helpful feedback.

One problem was the drums. I used a lot of "cuts" and "holds", and it had a very BiaB sound. I'd manually edited some of the guitars, but the drums - they had to go. I went through a number of UJAM kits because they're more contemporary, but that didn't fit. The Toontrack Singer-Songwriter kit had recently been on sale, and to my ears, it was a perfect fit. I used some MIDI tracks that came with it, making some minor edits and writing the intro and ending. Nice.

In my mind, I heard the track as a simple, intimate arrangement. floyd jane heard strings.

I have lots of string libraries, but I had intended for a while to write some string parts in MuseScore, because I hate working with keyswitches. There's a cool plugin for Reaper for making keyswitches easy, and I'd spent a bunch of time setting up for my libraries and then losing it all when I changed computers. Time to learn MuseScore!

Since I was thinking small and intimate, I decided to go with a simple string trio. That's not going to produce a "lush" string sound that floyd jane had suggested!

Many hours later, I had a better idea of how to do things in MuseScore. I also added a viola, although I notated it with the bass clef, because life is short and even though I "played" viola as a kid, I never learned to read the alto clef properly. (Thus explaining why "played" is in quotes).

I already have a great appreciation for Shigeki, especially for his string writing. Doing this gave me even more respect for him.

The results weren't great, and floyd jane politely told me that they didn't soar.

So I had another go at it, this time focusing on writing for a violin section with smoothly connected block chords. But that just sounded like a string pad. I exported the MIDI and tried using a different string libraries, but the problem was the writing, not the sounds. MuseScore also exported some unexpected stuff, and I didn't have the patience to figure it out.

And mixing a big string section is tricky. Well, tricky for me to mix. It eats up a lot of air.

Because I'd already sunk many hours into writing string quartet, I went back and made some corrections. OK, lots of corrections. Eventually it sounded less terrible, but it still sounded small and thin, just like a real string quartet. You can especially hear it in the entrances to the chorus. If this was a real string section, I could just overdub it. That obviously won't work here. I tried using an ADT effect, and the result was terrible.

I also added an oboe, because oboes are lovely. They also make small string sections sound bigger which is a win. floyd jane had a number of suggestions here as well, like holding off on the oboe until the second verse.

With the oboe removed from the introduction, it needed something. I stole a leaf from Suno and gave the strings a bit of melody to play. Problem solved!

Over the several days this was happening, floyd jane also had a look at my lyrics, and had a few things to say about that, too. wink

I had put in a lot of words that I thought made the lyrics more conversational, like "No, ..." and "But, ...". I also used lots of filler words because I liked how it sounded.

floyd jane made it clear that I needed to stop with that nonsense and excise that cruft. The result is more direct, less cluttered lyrics.

He also suggested altering the line "Now that I'm the lonely one" to "I'm the lonely one", which made me super sad because I knew he was right, but it broke my heart to make the change. It's funny how I get attached to lyrics, or can't imagine the song without particular notes.

But hey, it's just a song. laugh

It's weird looking at the lyrics written out, and realizing how few words there actually are in the song. What made it hard was somehow deciding that everything needed to rhyme with "...ound". Even after multiple rewrites, I was surprised to find that "around" had made it into the song three times.

As usual, I sliced-and-diced the main vocal so I could equalize it in sections. I've got VocalRider, but this seems to do better. I made some changes to the vocals after making all those edits, but I think I got them all corrected. In any places where I missed fixing it, there's a small "click". frown I also adjusted the silibance while I was at it, but bumped it up in some places where I thought it needed the clarity.

There were some places where the FX on the electric piano was causing some gravelly sounds. Putting a notch filter seems to have cleared that up. And I just had to re-render it in an attempt to get the lyric "gone grey" to not sound like "gone bray".

Thanks again to Dan for showing off what Suno can do, and floyd jane for many, many helpful suggestions.

Edit: I made some fixes to the string quartet part, and adjusted the volume a bit.

As always, have at it! smile

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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