Details below!

Edit: Minor changes in the mix.

The Writing on the Wall

Aberdine's bound for Texas
She packed her bags one morning
And left without a forwarding address
It's like she'd never even been here
With nothin' round to keep her
No one in town she's gonna miss

Aberdine hopped a greyhound
She's dreaming of tomorrow
Leaving darker days far behind
Already forgot me
And the promises she made
They somehow never crossed her mind

CHORUS
No, I don't blame her none
Though she lied and she said she'd call
When your heart believes
It's hard to clearly read
The writing on the wall
The writing on the wall

Aberdine's gone to texas
I wake up in the morning
And I just can't believe that she's gone
I'll keep on pretending
That phone is gonna ring
And that she's finally comin' home


Technical Details
Strummed Guitars - Native Instruments, Strummed Acoustic 1 & 2
Bass - Electric, ModernCountrySync Ev16 100
Piano - Rhythm PopRootsyJohn Ev16 100
Drums - EZ Drummer, Vintage Rock Kit
Strings - Garritan Personal Orchestra, Session Strings
Vocal Processing - Waves Tune, Nectar
Mastering - Ozone 7 Elements
Effects - EZMix
DAW - Reaper

Notes
This song took a lot more work to finish that I expected. To be honest, I wasn't sure I'd ever get it done!

In what seemed like a good idea at the time, I decided that it would be a good idea to upgrade my computer with parts assembled from Craigslist. Wrong size case, bad power supply, problems installing Windows, issues with the video card... Even today, when it's relatively stable, it still crashed on me three times while editing the mix. (Turning off one of the overclocking options in the BIOS might have fixed that problem).

First world problems a-plenty. crazy

Continuing my personal songwriting challange, this time time around I figured I should build a song from ground up using BiaB. I ended up with the PopRootsyJohn style, but ended up replacing just about every other BiaB track except for the piano and bass.

I had a lot of tracks here - including a Korg M1 and Wavestation - but in the mixing stage, it was apparent that more is actually less. The mix is probably still too busy... feel free to comment on that, too, if that floats your boat. smile

One nice thing about the style is that the piano part is MIDI, so I was able edit various bits like the intro and the bridge and thicken the right hand voicing up a bit. I tried a bunch of pianos sounds, and ended up with the one from BiaB, doubled with an electric piano.

I also got stuck in Rewrite Hell. After working out the backing tracks and a melody, I ended up writing three different songs before I got one I liked. Even then, I spent way too long finessing the lyrics. David Snyder I'm not.

Singing is always a challenge. I envisioned the song sung an octave lower, but I'm really pitchy in that register, and some of the notes were too low for the pitch correction software to recognize! blush

Even when I set the melody in a decent register, it took several sessions before I was able to get usable vocals. My hat's off to you folk who make all this look so easy!

With the recent discussion about "modern" vocals, I decided to have a go at it myself. There's a plethora of effects on the lead vocal, including a hard "auto tuned" version sitting under the lead, as well as an even quieter version of the lead pitched a whole octave down! And that's not even including what Nectar, EZ Mix, Ozone Elements and other plugins are doing.

As usual, feedback of all sorts is appreciated.

Last edited by dcuny; 05/18/18 08:37 PM.
-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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