PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase Bound for Freedom - Updated Mix

Another song! (Duh) See notes below for exciting details!

Edit: This is a new mix, with some additional harmonies that I'd left off the first time. Hopefully it's an improvement over the prior mix. I also did some editing to add missing consonants to some of the words, turning feels into fields, and so on.

Bound for Freedom

I've spent a lifetime working for the man
Won't let me go until I die
But heaven lies far beyond these fields
I'm getting ready to fly

Tell the conductor of that Gospel Train
I've got my ticket in my hand
My bags are packed for the Promised Land
I'll join that heavenly band

Chorus:
This is a railroad that's got no track
It's bound for freedom and it's never turning back
Praise the Lord and get on board
We're bound for freedom

I hear an angel knocking on my door
I see her standing in the light
It's time to cross to that other shore
She says it's time to take flight


Technical Details
Strummed Guitars - Native Instruments, Strummed Acoustic 1 & 2
Bass - Drums on Demand, Essential Bass (loops)
Drums - EZ Drummer, Nashville Basic Brushes
Horns - Zero-G, Brass Elements (loops)
Sax Solo - Band in a Box, Sax, Tenor, Soloist PopCountryMark Ev 085 #2019

Vocal Processing - Waves Tune
Mastering - Ozone 7 Elements
Effects - EZMix
DAW - Reaper

Notes
As part of my personal songwriting challenge, I'm working on incorporating various cool things that I've bought, but never gotten around to using, into my songs.

This time, I started with the EZDrummer Nashville Brush kit - lovely sounds! I added the Session Guitars to that, which are my current go-to toy. As usual, I built the bass line using Essential Bass loops. It's probably not the best way to get things done, but I like the level of control.

Then I went searching through my hard drive and found Zero-G Brass Elements loops, and went to town with those. Probably way too much horn, but whatever. Horns are cool.

I tried adding some other horn elements using Session Horns, but it was sort of blah. Maybe next time.

Backing tracks completed, I worked out a melody, which I thought was fairly nice, but verse and chorus are a probably a bit too similar too each other. My daughter concurs, saying the song "sounds the same" all the way through. I thinned out the vocal on the verses, and went with a big harmony sounds, but it's still an issue. Lesson learned.

I left a big hole in the middle to drop in a guitar solo from BiaB, and got to work on the lyrics.

Speaking of lessons learned, did I bother to check the range of the song this time around? Of course not!

I'm not David Snyder, so writing lyrics ended up taking about a week. Since the song has a sort of bluesy Gospel sort of feel, I went in that direction and ended up with a song about the Underground Railroad.

When it came time to fill in the bridge with an instrumental, I couldn't find any guitar solo that worked. I finally hit on the second to the last Sax soloist. The first solo one out of gate fit perfectly.

The vocals are obviously a bit lower than usual - it's a comfortable range, but it tends to be a bit "tubby" and harder to carve out space in the mix for.

My son's friend wondered how I got that cool distorted sound on the vocal. Turns out gain staging isn't something I excel at. Sorry about that. The ReLife plugin helped recover it a bit.


As always, feedback of any sort if appreciated.

David,

I really like this - it sounds to me like it could be a lost track from The Band's Big Pink era albums...

Very nice indeed.

Bob

Wow! Great song. Loved the intro very original. Also like how you added the sax.
Great tune and most enjoyable. Rob

What a tune! I really enjoyed this one, dcuny. It's wonderfully catchy, and the addition of those horns was a great touch. I'm just imagining this sounding unreal in a live setting. This is exactly the kind of tune you can you can easily belt the chorus to at the top of your lungs while it's playing on a road trip.

Great work, and thanks so much for sharing

Dave,

This song is A LOT of fun!

I like the way you mixed up your different tools from your tool kit on this one.



Great job

Sensational. Not a lot wrong with this at all. I did really like the lyrics.

The punctuation of the horns throughout added further dimension.

Vocally, it might be easy to break-away from the very straight delivery and try introducing 3rd's as a variation (instead of "and get on board" try "and get on bo-ard" lifting the last syllable by a 3rd).

Just a thought.

Thanks, Bob!

Hi, Rob.

Yeah, I was sweating when I couldn't find a guitar track that I could drop in. I didn't think the sax would fit the loops, but I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked - it fits, but is different enough to give a nice change in the middle of the song.

Pundits have declared the sax as "dead" in pop music, but it sounds great to me.

Thanks!

Thanks, Deryk.

It's sort of hard to go wrong with horns, right?

I appreciate the positive feedback!

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

As I was working on the lyrics, I kept thinking If I was David Snyder, I'd have done a half dozen songs by now!

I've still got a bunch of instruments that I need to make use of, so I'll try to keep them coming.

Thanks!

Whenever I get lyrics that work out well, I worry that I'm accidentally re-writing something I've heard before. But in this case, they're intentionally derivative, because I wanted to try keeping to the traditional language of the spiritual.


I actually put in the horns before I figured out the vocal. There are some places I thought I really should drop the horns (or at least duck them below the vocal), but they're so darned cool I just left them there.


Yeah, rhythmic variety is a good idea.

One of the challenges I've set for myself is writing the songs backwards from my normal process. That means building the backing first, then creating a melody, and then fitting lyrics to the melody, with the rule of no changing the melody.

That leads to a lot of frustration in the lyric writing step, but it's a good exercise.

So I'll leave that line in place "as is", if only because I'm too lazy to re-record it.

Thanks!

I agree!! I like the vocal sound...kind of puts me in mind of ZZ Top's "I'm Bad I'm Nationwide"! Thanks, Torrey

David,

It was as much fun reading the details of how the song came to be as it was listening (which was a LOT of fun!).

The vocal "sound" threw me at first, but it took very little time to become accustom to it - and to see it as an integral part of the song.

Cool horns. Cool bass. Cool acoustic rhythm...

I got a David Byrne/Talking Heads vibe...

Enjoyed.

fj

This was such a catchy song, and I really enjoyed reading on how this song came to be. I love story time! Really awesome job here, and I really enjoyed the vocals.

Thanks for sharing!

Hi, Torrey.

Thanks! I really should have paid attention to when I saw it clipping, but I figured "It's really not bad", but it turns out it was exactly that bad. Lesson learned... maybe.

Hi, floydjane. (I'm not sure how that gets ProperCased...)


Thanks! As I mentioned, these are all toys that I got because of the "cool" factor, and songwriting is sort of an excuse to use them. Sort of the wrong motivation, but...


That's all I ask.

Hi, Ember.

Thanks for the kind words! I'll remember to include song details in the future.

I was feeling a bit guilty that I didn't use as many BiaB tracks as I intended, so I also wanted to explain why the song turned out the way it did.

I should note - a few people have heard the song, and asked where I found the sax player...

David, I like this one a lot. Great mix. Way to go finding all these different sources and getting them to work together so well. Very much enjoyed! Tom

Hi, Tom.

I'm glad you liked it!

Thanks for listening.

Great funky gospel song, catchy like George Michael's Faith. Nicely built band from so many different sources, but still sounding very compact, especially horns and the strumming guitar are nice, a big hit on my top 40 radio station

Your effected voice is excellent, makes you sound like a grunge artist (Vedder/Grohl style).

Janne