Another Day ------> http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11671298

We just moved from one state to another this past weekend and almost everything is is still packed in a jungle of boxes. As soon as I come across our BIAB Drive, I'll post the RT's used.

We wrote this one for the heck of it. We said "Let's write a Country-Pop song." And this is where we ended up. The more we got into, the more we felt we had either a Lady Antebellum or a Rascal Flats ballad sound. This one really stretched my (Alan's) vocal range and it shows in places. This is a WIP ... still needs harmony on the chorus and a final mix. As always, we're open to any suggestions and appreciate all comments.

BTW, for the folks who've inquired about Di ... she had a stroke a couple of years ago and she's having some serious issues because of it at this time and is currently unable sing. We're hoping that changes soon ... don't know, though.

Hope you enjoy. Oh, it's a bit loud. Will fix that on the final mix and master.

Alan & Di



Another Day

(v1)
The sky went dark, the wind stood still
You left me in the shadow of
Another lover's call
You left me here, standing on the edge
But there's no place for me to fall

Pre-Chorus
What will I do, where will I go
How could I find another, when I love you so
Perhaps I never told you, I guess I thought you knew
I'd give my life, I'd give anything for you

CHORUS
Another day of dying without you
No sun no moon, no early morning dew
Another day, of forever turning blue
Without you, there ain't no way
I can go on another day

INSTRUMENTAL

Repeat Pre-Chorus

Repeat Chorus

(c) 2012 Alan D. David, BMI / Diana Bowers

Nice job Al! Pretty song, and well arranged (particularly liked the drum fills and lead guitar). I think a little filling out with BG vocals is a great idea as the production sounds pretty big for only a lead vocal. Nice work!! Take care. Greg

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the listen and very nice comments. We're going to redo the vocals, add vocal harmony on the chorus and then remix. And you are right, the vocal is naked on the chorus as is. We plan on adding 4-part harmony and see how that sounds.

Thanks again. We really appreciate your visit and nice comments! Best to ya ...

Alan ^& Di

Hi Alan,

nice song. Sounds good to me as is.
But I'm looking forward to your remix.

Guenter

Hey Alan & Di. I really enjoyed your country pop tune. This is a well written song and I'm sure you guys had fun doing it.

As to where it fits in the genre, not so much Lady Antebellum or Rascal Flats for me, but it is really well suited for Jennifer Nettles, formally with Sugarland. Check out her song "Good Time to Cry" on YouTube. It is lyrically similar to your song and is not so much the traditional country pop song with the arrangement and instruments they use but her feeling and passionate vocals fit your song like hand in glove to me. Maybe when Di gets back to where she can sing you can try a mix with her on vocals. I think you may get some good BG ideas from her arrangement too since you plan to add some and you plan to revisit this.

I think you have a really good song here.

Charlie

Alan & Di...

This is your best write (IMO). Really nice. Direct, simple.

The lead guitar - is that you? if it's an RT, would really like to know what it is - the beginning of the lead takes off the way it should - getting the RT solos to do that is sometimes less than easy... either way, it's is REALLY well done.

Don't hear many songs these days (major releases) at this tempo. Not to say, you should do it, but, I think this could work at a mid-tempo pace, as well...

Enjoyed that a lot...

floyd

(what state are you in now?)

Since it's a "WIP" I'll hold off the nits until you declare it "done" or at least closer.

For now.... I like the progress to this point. The vox are a few db too loud. Adding BGV and HBGV will simply make it louder, so pull the vox down. You did mention that so you're aware of this issue. I don't know what DAW you use to mix final in, however, I use busses for the vocals.... that allows me to easily adjust the vox level in the song without messing with the balance between the vox tracks.

You're off to a good start.

Guenter,

Thanks a bunch! Glad you liked it!

Alan & Di

Hi Charlie,

We always enjoy hearing from you. We hadn't thought of Jennifer Nettles but you just might be right about that! And we agree, she's a fabulous singer and sings with so much passion. Her song "Stay" showcased her voice and we've been huge fans of hers ever since.

Di said she wants to do it as a duet with m when she can sing again. Hopefully that will be relatively soon ... but probably at least a month or two at the very earliest.

Thank you so much for the very kind words!

Alan & Di

Hi Floyd,

Yes, that's me on the guitar. It might be the last song on which I do my own lead, other than the silly little stuff I do around the house. The focal dystonia is quickly robbing me of my playing skills. We did this in late 2012, if I remember correctly.

Although a few songs have made it high one the charts with this or a similar tempo, you are correct that they are not the meat and potatoes of Nashville at this time. They want uptempo, quirky stuff.

Glad this one sat nicely in your ears. We appreciate you letting us know that. Best to you,

Alan & Di

Hi Herb,

Tis always with a smile on our face we read your comments and crits. Your technical knowledge of recording, mixing and mastering always leaves in awe. Should you like to, we'd be more than happy to hear anything else you think would help this.

I (Alan) have to admit my ignorance ... I'm not familiar with busses for vocal editing. Please give me a little info on that! We arrange and record in BIAB, use RT as a DAW and do a little shaping using Audacity. We keep it real simple! Heck, we're dang near 70 years old and simple is usually a good thing for us old farts!

Seriously, we're always open to new and better ideas to improve our songs. We have a lot of respect for you and would love to hear anything else you might want offer us for future recording, mixing, etc. Thanks for your input and nice words on this one! Best to ya!

Alan & Di

Dear Al & Di !

I am so sorry for your health condition ! I hope that
everything will turn out okay as soon as possible,
at least we can pray that it could do so !
Your tune is very nice with a very nice melody,
to me that was very good already !:))

Cheers
Dani

I don't work in Real Band using it as a DAW. I simply render my audio from it and then send those tracks to Sonar.

Most DAW's allow you to use busses.... RB might, I've never used it to mix so I really don't know if it does.

Quite simply you have tracks and then you have busses. A buss is simply another kind of track. IN a DAW, you send your track outputs to a MASTER OUTPUT or master buss. That's where everything ends up in the final mix. In Sonar, you can add additional BUSSES in between the track level and the master output level.

Why I use busses. Lets say I have 2 acoustic guitars and a dobro ..... three electric guitars and 5 vocal tracks plus all the other bass, drum, etc tracks. Since I want the 2 acoustics to sound similar, I can pop the FX into the tracks.... but then I end up with dozens of instances of FX plugs in each track..... add the electric track plug, the vocal track plugs and before long I literally have dozens of fx plugs and each one of them has to be adjusted and each one of them pulls CPU processing power. So.... I insert 3 new stereo busses.
One for acoustics, one for electrics and one for vox. I drop one reverb and one eq plug into the bus, reassign the individual tracks to the appropriate buss and the tracks stay empty. I now can do what I need to do in the bus. The reverb in the buss effects all the tracks coming in...same with EQ... compression...etc.

This really comes in handy on the vocal tracks. I pan the tracks, I envelope the tracks and send them to the buss. I pop the eq and verb into the vox buss and it generally handles everything at the same time. Occasionally I will have to effect the lead vox differently but not often.

Once everything is set properly, to raise or lower the levels of the vocals takes moving one slider not 5. This also allows me to insert melodyne directly into the tracks, fix the issue, and bounce it directly to the track without getting the reverb and eq permanently printed to the vocal track in question since the eq and verb are not in the track, they're in the buss further down the signal path from the track.

ON some occasions I have used busses for the opposite reason. Occasionally, the vox just isn't loud enough to set properly in the mix even when it's up to 0db..... so I insert a new stereo buss... name it "BAND" and route all the instruments to it. NOW..... I can turn the band down while maintaining the musical balance and envelopes I have taken hours to set up.... in about 5 minutes.

Every song I do uses this process. It saves time in the long run. Especially when you have spent hours working on something like vocals only to find that they need to come up or go down a few db......

Check your DAW to see if it supports bussing the tracks and play with it to get a feel for how it works. It is a very handy tool to use.

If Real Band doesn't allow bussing..... check out Music Creator 6 by Cakewalk.... it's a great DAW and is under $50 IIRC.... maybe even cheaper....

Herb,

Thank you so very much! I'll look into RT to see if it have busses. That's all new to me. I've been a performer all my life and just been into recording the past couple of years. I sure do appreciate the education. I'll look into those various things and check them out. Di and I are truly appreciative of this info. Thanks so much!!!!

Alan & Di

Dani,

Thanks for taking this one for ride. Glad you liked it! And we both appreciate your kind words regarding our health. We've both been to the doctor and are starting to mend. Best to you!

Alan & Di

Hello Al and Di,

First: I'm very sorry to hear about your health issues. I hope that Di's condition will improve, the same goes for your focal dystonia Al.
Although less serious (I hope) I can relate to this. My current RSI problems make it virtually impossible for me to play the guitar also. Luckily we have RT's!

Back to the song then: of course there could be all kinds of improvements to both the arrangement and the vocals but that doesn't change the fact that this song is really heartfelt and beautiful in my opinion. I love the build up, the sus chords, the singing line and electric guitar solo as well.
It is the sort of song I like to write myself (but didn't )
furthermore: all the respect for you, to still be so active in creating music at your age.

Regards,
Rob

Hi Rob & Anne-Marie,

Thank you for the listen. We're delighted you like the song, even with it's remaining flaws. And yes, there is significant room for improvement. We're going to get to them just as soon as we can.

I looked up RSI and found that it's very similar to focal dystonia. I can still play the guitar but I have lost the ability to do some the really fast riffs and certain chords are more and more difficult to make on the guitar. I hope your cfondition gets no worse. Like focal dystonia, there's no simple, clear-cut remedies. We sufferers just have to learn to live with it, for the most part.

That guitar solo was probably the last one I'll play, other than relatively simple ones. You might have noticed I kept that lead riff very simple. I didn't have much choice.

Thanks again for the listen and the kind words. Wishing both of you well,

Alan & Di

Yes a very good song and your guitar struck me immediately as well. Very tasteful and soulful.

I'm glad I stopped in for a listen, there is a lot of heart in this song.

Hi Lawrence....

And we're equally glad you stopped in for a listen ... we appreciate it. And thanks for the very nice words. For a spur of the moment thing, we think it came out fairly decent. Still needs lots of TLC ... that's coming down the road.

Thanks again! Best to you,

Alan & Di

It's a beautiful song Al and the guitar riff is a perfect fit and IMO so is the tempo. I think it would make a great track for tv/film placement with the universal lyrics and the lovely haunting melody. I'd leave the arrangement as is - no adding harmonies to keep that lonely haunting quality it has and get a young sounding popish male singer to sing it - not any reflection on your singing but on a song like this the vocal is everything - I'm talking if you were to want to pitch it for tv/film.

Hope y'all are both doing better.

Josie

Hi Josie ....

Awwww, you are much too kind! Thank you for those wonderful words of encouragement. And no offense taken, whatsoever, regarding a young pop singer to sing this. I've never had an illusion that I was terrific singer ... adequate but not much beyond that.

You given us something new to think about ... always love that! Perhaps your are right about not adding anything else ... perhaps just lower the volume of the voice. We totally get the idea about keeping a singular voice to demonstrate how lonely and lost he feels, whereas adding vocal harmonies might negate that effect. Hmmm ... now ya got us to thinking more than we usually do! And that's a good thing!

One of the real benefits of this forum is getting new ideas about one's music; new ideas to explore; more thoughts to mull over. We love it!

Thanks again and we appreciate the well wishes. We are both quite sick at the moment ... been to the Dr twice in less than 10 days. You're always so sweet!

Alan & Di

Al and Di,

I say leave it as it is as it is wonderful now. Nice guitar work.

I wish you both the best with your health issues

Alyn

Hi Alyn,

We appreciate the well-wishes for our health. We are slowly mending.

Another vote for leaving it as is. Di and I are going to have to give this one some serious thought. We appreciate your input. And we're simply delighted you enjoyed the song. Thanks for letting us know,

Alan & Di

A&D, Cool sounding song. I really like the chord progression. Another keeper. Tom

Thanks, Tom! Glad ya liked it a bit! Thanks for letting us know. Best to ya,

Alan & Di

Love it Alan! Enjoy the drama of the song, the keyboard and your guitar. Best wishes to you and Di. Cheers.

Hi Rich,

Thanks for having a listen. Glad ya liked it. We appreciate you telling us so. Best to you,

Alan & Di