Title: The Blues Won’t Let You Down DJE 01/06/2019
Verse 1 I’ve seen em rise I’ve seen em fall Intoxicated on the way up Depressed when they stall Life’s no one way ticket You always hit the ground Open arms welcome you The blues won’t let you down
Verse 2 The latest best thing Always comes around The new kid on the block Just knocked you down Young turned to old fast You used to wear the crown Now you’re all alone but The blues won’t let you down
Bridge If you’re one of the lucky This world will break your heart Tear down all your ego dreams Turn your head around To what’s really worth it
Verse 3 A frantic dark night call Comfort from an old friend You pour out those tears Confess all your sins Unlike fair weather fans Who left without a sound You rest on a rock of ages The blues won’t let you down
Bridge If you’re one of the lucky This world will break your heart Tear down all your ego dreams Turn your head around To what’s really worth it
PopBlue Poppy Blue Groove Thanks in advance for listening. Constructive comments welcomed.
Belladonna, Thank you for sharing! Nice lyrics, I like the idea of Blues not letting you down. So true!
With some great input from several members here, my mixes improved in the past several month. I think if you use just a bit of reverb on vocals, it might blend things better. If you are using a DAW to record this, maybe even tiny bit of reverb and compression on the master bus, so whole mix blends better. It works for me.
Hey Donna, I like this song. You have a cool way with words. The track volume on this one is so low I had to turn it way up to hear it. Don't know if you had a soundcloud upload glitch or what. I got the volume warning message turning up the volume too high can damage hearing. Anyway, it's much to nice of a song for folks not to be able to easily hear so I hope you can bring up the gain and reload it.
Nice promising song, with a good lyric just a bit hard to hear - after turning it up I thought from a mix perspective that you could possibly turn up the drum a bit, and the vocal down a touch? Misha's tips are worth a try.
Your RealStyle selection for "The Blues Won't Let You Down" has just a touch of the "Motown" sound in it, enough for me to snap my fingers and exclaim, "all right, now, Ms. Belladonna, gimme some a' that good ol' rhythm & blues" ! Your voice bounced along with with style as though you were performing a duet with Smokey Robinson . I found myself harmonizing the words at the bridge along with your own harmonies!
Your lyrics speak about the bumps in the road of life in a way that made me smile to myself knowingly, rather than yield cynically to the "life ain't fair" complaint. That's because there's something affirmative about the lyrics, in spite of the woes they detail:
"Open arms welcome you..."
"Turn your head around To what's really worth it..."
"You rest on a rock of ages..."
It's as though you were planting seeds of strength amongst the weeds. The song seems to be as much about surviving adversity as it catalogs troubles that are sure to come our way. But what do I know? I'm just a helplessly optimistic kind'a fella who almost never fails to see the "upside" of life .
I've listened to your song three times as I was writing this, so now that I'm done commenting, I'm gonna go back and listen to it again, but this time with my full and undivided attention.
Bluage you are always so gracious and I do believe you always look at the upside of life. Thanks for enjoying the song so much and all your wonderful comments.
As I listened to this, it was so easy to see that you've put an awful lot of consideration into getting exactly the right words together. Personally, I find that it's no easy task maintaining rhyme and meter and binding it to a melody. I congratulate you on a fine effort with words, music, arrangement and presentation!
Out of curiosity, what DAW do you use for you final mix? As others have mentioned, this was very low volume. If you could let the forum know what software you use for mixing, I'm pretty sure someone will let you know how to make the final mix louder.
Nice work on this As others mentioned, the volume is wonky but I do enjoy the song. Really interesting lyrics, and the way you perform them is emotional and captivating. Definitely has a dark aura to it, but that's never a bad thing in my book.
Noel, Thanks for asking about the DAW. Here's the process I'm currently using as I am a real newbie to mixing. I select my style and enter chords in BIAB. I then export it to Real Band and add the vocals and harmonies. I tried to add a little reverb in Real Band (small room dark) but it seemed to distort the vocals way too much, so I really didn't add reverb there. I tried to listen to the loudness/softness of all the instruments and vocals and tried to adjust it all. It seemed to right volume to me when I saved as a wav from Real Band. I then imported the wav file into Audacity and added a little fade in, a teeny bit of reverb there and saved as a wav again.
Hi Belladonna, Perhaps your problem with the volume comes from Audacity. You have to normalize all your tracks. You will find this in the effects. I hope that will help you. Christian
This song is much too pretty to not hear, so I tried to help. I squished it & squashed it in Audacity... And I emailed it to you... Hopefully it sounds OK to you. I like it! *********** Edited Portion: I decided to take a chance & I hope I do not offend Belladonna nor any forum user... I tried to fix the song in Audacity... Created a video with her lyrics... Then uploaded the video version. While we wait for updated version on SoundCloud... I hope you enjoy my humble efforts to help her out.
It’s all been said. The write, as with all of yours, is excellent. Regarding the track gain I have marginally functional ears and I could not safely turn my monitors up enough to get a good idea off the production. A good limiter would help you very much. It’s more than normalizing or boosting db’s in a wave editor like Audacity. And this music production thing is a journey...not a destination so dig in and it’ll come.
Janice & Bud, Thanks for your nice comments. You'll probably laugh but I don't even know what a "limiter" is. It's obvious I'm really new to all this. And it doesn't help right now that I'm going into my crazy busy tax season, which gobbles up almost every bit of my time. But I'm a very persistent soul and I will not give up. I'll record this again as soon as I can and see what I can figure out. Have to brush up on the compression, normalizing, amplifying, mortifying, etc. Looks like I have a long learning curve.
Hi Phil, I took the link down on my Soundcloud page because the mix was no good. My vocals were way to low and the instruments were too loud in comparison. Jim here tried to correct it some in Audacity. i'm a newbie at mixing and certainly didn't get it right, but I hope to try it again soon if I can. Thanks for your kind comments.
I could hear that, but I still liked the song. Not sure what you use to record. When I started I asked a friend of mine in radio production what would be a good microphone that wouldn't break the bank - ended up with an Audio Technica ST 90 MKII Dynamic Microphone. Also on another friend's recommendation I bought this TC Helicon Harmony-G XT. It has the added bonus of being able to add simple harmonies if you ever perform live, but I don't like the harmonies it produces for recording. They sound a little too ... electronic. Better than nothing performing solo live, though.
But! Just as a recording interface/compressor, I like it a lot. Ended up finding one used so I didn't pay an arm and a leg for it.
I also ... and you might get away with one of these and NOT use the Helicon ... a Focusrite 2i2 for a mic interface to your computer. That and a decent mic will go a long way to picking your vocals up better. I use both. I run the mic through the Helicon, and then through the Focusrite, and on to the laptop.
I use Reaper for my DAW software. It's only like $60 for people like us.
Anyway, it's much to nice of a song for folks not to be able to easily hear so I hope you can bring up the gain and reload it.
! Your voice bounced along with with style as though you were performing a duet with Smokey Robinson 
. I found myself harmonizing the words at the bridge along with your own harmonies!
.