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.

David & Son,

First things first... LOVE the drum sound. Loud and Proud as they should be for a song like this.

The bass and piano work perfectly with them (drums). Really nicely mixed/balanced. (and I'm hearing percussion that I don't see listed - a nice addition - wood block?)

The guitar solo sounds good.

A nice write. Interesting lyrics throughout - especially the "choruses".

The interweaving of vocals is ASTOUNDING! Not an easy thing to do - an exceptional job. And at that point, the voices sound really good together.

Nice drop at the end.

The mix is SUPERB! This really POPS through my speakers.

Several listens. Worth it.

fj

The best yet of these so far I think, David. Either you are getting better working with those synth vocals or they are starting to grow on me!

Drums sound great! I would have said "loud and proud" but I see floyd beat me to it

Entire mix sounds fabulous through my studio 'phones.

Good song, enjoyed.

Hi David,

Fabulous. Loved the whole thing.

When I looked at the number of rhythm instrument RTs in the list, I was expecting
the mix to sound cluttered and confused, but not a bit of it. Everything was clear
and the rhythms were working together like a well balanced machine.

Something about the female voice, slightly unreal but haunting, really brought me out
in goosebumps and made me go back and play the track again straight away.

It has the feel of one track from a "concept" album - as though it's part of a
story still to be told. Fascinating.

Wouldn't change anything. Your best yet.

ROG.

Hi, floyd jane. A nice start to my morning seeing you as the first post!

It means a lot to get your approval on the drums.

The additional percussion is actually baked into the RealDrums, which makes mixing it... interesting. It would have been nice to have some variations to the track that didn't have the percussion, but that wasn't an option with these tracks.


I wasn't sure there was going to be a '70's guitar sound to match what I had in my head, but I finally found just the thing. It took a bit of tweaking to get it to set right in the mix, but the result was exactly what I was looking for.


I'm glad that the lyrics worked. I was tweaking them throughout the mixing process, up even past the final mix, as I noticed lyrics that didn't work. For example, I was typing out the lyrics getting ready to post the song here when I noticed the I'd intended to complete a line as:

maybe we got tired of waiting
for us to change

but actually ended it with a lyric that no longer connected the two lines together:

maybe we got tired of waiting
can't forget or forgive

Fortunately, it was super easy to jump into Synthesizer V, change the lyric and re-render the vocals.

I know the last couple of songs have had the same sort of "interweaving" vocal effect, but it's really fun to do, and I love the sound. For prototyping counter lines, I think this is where it's really nice to have synthetic voices. They don't complain about last minute changes to lyrics or melodies.


Awesome! I'll let "& Son" know. It really helps to have another pair of ears to bounce things off, especially since we'll often listen for different things.

The first thing he noticed was the snare and the lack of mids on the drums, and then getting the bass to sound like what I thinks a bass should sound like. I don't have the same sensitivity to gaps in frequencies, which is why Izotope is making a ton of money spectral balance tools to people like me.

He handed back a re-mixed version that was overly compressed, because ear fatigue had set in. Dialing everything down brought back the headroom, and putting an impulse response on the drum also brought in a lot of mids and lows.

Thanks for your encouragement!

Hi, Dave.

Thanks, although I suspect it's the latter.

Ironically, throughout the composition process, I was thinking it was my worst song so far, but since I'd committed to it, I needed to finish it up. Fortunately, the lyrics finally fell into place and I got the melody and counter-line to work a bit better.

But funny how you can't tell when you're so close to it.


Glad to hear it, thanks!

I appreciate you stopping by to listen and comment.

Thanks, ROG.

I'm really happy that it translated well to other people's speakers/headphones. And that you liked the song.


Good to hear! I do tend to put in a lot of instruments, and this time I made an effort to stick with only a small number - at least, small number for me.

I think I mentioned that some of the instruments were playing similar roles, so that made it easy to decide to swap one out when another was playing. Plus, I really hate having a song sound the same all the way through, and staggering the instruments is an effective (and easy) way to do that.


I think the vocal straddles the line between "overly pitch corrected" and "Vocaloid", which isn't a bad place to be. It's not quite human, but I think it is very musical. Most importantly, it isn't so distracting that it detracts from being able to pay attention to the song.


Cool, I'll consider it done and start working on a new track of that "concept" album you mentioned.

I appreciate you taking the time to listen and post.

Hi David,

Good research work. Astonishing the result, in good. The arrangement is not overloaded with the sound tracks you list. This composition must have taken you many hours ? Very interesting this composition. Well done

Kindly regards
Derochette
alias
JaniJackFlash

Hi Dave, This is really well-done!

First of all... the drums sounds perfect in the mix, so don't even consider turning them down...

I like the vocals - especially in the chorus... sounding very well there!

Sometimes I wish you would publish a song without telling us it is Eleanor, because if you listen to modern music and the so-called "popular songs" these days, many of them use a heavy amount of pitch-correcting software (like autotune), which sometimes makes it quite hard to hear if it is a real singer or a "vocaloid" performance. I think you would be able to fool us if you didn't tell us upfront that it is Synth V.

Anyway, I think this track is the best you have published so far with Eleanor... I liked it a lot!

Will

Well done. You are really getting the hang of that program (you already have the hang of BIAB). The "female" really belted out your superb lyrics. This sounds creepy, I know, but she sounds rather sweet. I'm not sure who did the male vocals (you or the program), but, either way, they harmonized with the female well. Cool song. Good music by the old stand by band too.

Hi, Derochette.

Thanks!

I did spend a lot of time working out the melody/counter line. But most of that was because I during the mixing, I kept getting ideas of changes that I could make. The nice thing about using synthetic voices is that it's really easy to make changes to a vocal line, whether that's the pitch, the lyric, or some expressive parameter.

Thanks for listening and commenting!

Hi, Will.

Noted!


Yeah, I think that's more a function of getting used to people overusing Autotune (guilty!), although I think Synthesizer V also sounds better than Vocaloid.

I've heard some Synthesizer V songs that have managed to be emotional and expressive. So there's certainly capability for the singing to be more expressive. That's something worth exploring a bit more.


Glad to hear it!

Hi, Sean.

Yeah, I also hear autotuned vocals as unnatural, but "sweet". I think there's an effortlessness to the singing, as well as a purity of pitch that triggers that response.

I haven't had to do a whole lot to "tune" the voice, other than try to get it in a good range, and adjust the phonemes for "American English" pronunciation. Synthesizer V sounds surprisingly good "out of the box", so to speak.


That was also also the same program. There's a "Gender" parameter that automatically adjusts the position of the formants and some other attributes, and it does a pretty good job.

And yes - the band certainly earns their money.

Thanks for commenting!

David,

This track really sounds great! Your mix is exceptionally good! It's clean with everything articulated and separated. The song has a really inviting sound to it keeping the listeners attention all the way! I agree with Dave in that these songs of yours just keep getting better! Take care, T

You're really getting you hands around that synth vocal stuff.

Another great example of what can be done with some creativity and talent.

moto

David,
Without doubt, this is the best synth vocal I`ve ever heard- quite amazing on the chorus.
A flawless production; you combine Biab with other virtual instruments in a very professional way... but,the best news is, at the songwriters level, you are working with very good lyrics and structure.
I enjoyed this very much!

Robert

Very cool song. It just blows me away how good that vocaloid is. I can only imagine how much work it is to put this together. Very well done

Hi David ...

You and your son delivered again! As Scott said, I can't begin to imagine the amount of work you put into this. I love the harmonies of the vocaloid. Also, that strong percussion is super. I always like drums and percussions to be prominent ... with very few exceptions. Congrats and a difficult mission well executed. Some really good listening here. Take care ...

Alan

Wow! The first few moments I wouldn't have known the vocals were synth had I not known. (If that makes any sense). I think your female synth is inching ever closer to being "real." The male synth not too bad either. I'm impressed.

The instruments sound good. Mix is good.

Really enjoyed the tune!

Bryan

Hi, Torrey.

I appreciate the encouragement!

The next challenge (in addition to continuing to write) is to get things to sound good in my car stereo. I played my last couple mixes there, and the results were pretty disheartening.

Thanks for having a listen.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

Hi, Robert.

Thanks! I'm going to see if I can wring a bit more expressiveness out of it next time.


Good to hear - writing's my weak point.

Not that I can't do it, more that I haven't been. So it's good to hear I'm on the right track.

Thanks, Scott!

I can assure you it didn't take nearly as much work as trying to get a good vocal recorded in my house!

Hi, Alan.

Thanks for the kind words!

Doing the harmonies is the fun part!

I wasn't sure the drums would work out - the bell tree is a bit busy - but I really love the percussion on that track, and it would be hard to imagine it without it now. Funny how arrangements can grow on you.

Hi, Bryan.

Heh. Now I need to try to make that illusion last a few seconds more.

Thanks for stopping for a listen!

Man, what magic you perform, David. Thanks also for taking the time to add the blah blah part. This song is both inspirational with your creative ways, and well mixed. Sounds like you were headed down the Spector path of Wall Of Sound, but managed to add the right speed bumps.

That is a great and well mixed band. Drums are fine. Almost everybody mixes them too low.
Everything makes for a good soundstage on our KRK's. We aren't cans people

Nice write also.
"..pieces of our hearts
that won't fit right
we always seem to fight..."

Our fav line of many good ones and it gets the hook in from the get go.

With your description, an informative read indeed, and the detailed responses there's not a lot left to say.

We like the vocal arrangement with the harmony and counterpoint stuff...really well done.

We were wondering if you've considered adding a bit of vibrato to the vocals?

It's most interesting following you on this journey.

J&B

Love major 7ths and the rest of the chord progression is also interesting, I usually try to think what other song this sounds like but this time I couldn't find one, that's a sign of originality. Or maybe there's some Duran Duran in the chorus melody
Nothing wrong with the mix, very good sounding drums and bass, good that the drums are dominating. Also Eleanor sounds clean and clear. The solo guitarist fits well.

Janne

Thanks, Marty!

I've certainly had productions in the past where I should have had far less instruments! Good thing this wasn't one of them.

Glad you could stop and listen!

Hi, J&B.

Good to hear it works without headphones. I'm using RealPhones to listen to the mix, and they simulate a number of different environments. Unfortunately, I still need to figure out how to make my mixes translate well to my car stereo.


Thanks for mentioning that!


Yes, but with a caveat.

I've been trying to use the voice as "out of the box" as possible, and still sound good, with the goal of getting it out the door as quickly as possible while keeping the quality high.

The results are good, but as you already know, vocals are key.

I've been spending time listening to some well-tuned songs, and it really makes a difference. But I really haven't put in enough time to learn how to do this well.

Fortunately, a lot songs that are posted as videos show the playback on the song using the Synthesizer V editor, so you can see some of the tuning parameters. So I've been able to learn a couple tricks, so to speak.

Since I'm already a week behind schedule getting the next song done, I'll try to spend additional time on my latest song fine-tuning the vocals and see how that turns out.

At the point where I've got enough skill, I'll probably revisit the other songs and tune them up as well.


Thanks for the comments!

Hi, Janne.

Good to hear!

One of the nice things about BiaB is that it makes it (relatively) easy to change the chord progressions in songs, even relatively late in the process.


I doubt I've got much melodic originality.

Working backwards - chords, then melody, then lyrics - makes things interesting. Since I don't have any idea what sort of song I'm aiming for, I'll just put together a melody that I think sounds nice. Of course, there's plenty of tweaking in the process of hanging lyrics on the notes.

But it makes for some interesting "style" choices I wouldn't make if I worked the other way around. Sometimes the process of songwriting feels more like constructing a jigsaw puzzle than anything else!


Glad to get your feedback!