Week #49 - Pride

I fear it may sound slightly cringe-worthy, but I swear this piece was intentionally written this way. Oh, and it's a foray into (questionable at best) vocals for only the third time during this 11-month old project!



Description:

When I think of pride I go one of two ways. Either I think of an uplifting feeling of taking charge and having self respect, or I think of hubris and the failure of over-confidence. But these two ideas are really linked. In this instance, I went mainly for the negative angle, and I wanted the music to reflect the cluelessness of most people who suffer from hubris. But I wrote horn and string parts that are more uplifting. So it's very major, even fairly cheesy sounding, and the instrumentation is pretty straight forward, and I wanted the lyric to get more to the hubris theme.

Tools:

Propellerhead Record 1/Reason 4
Garritan Personal Orchestra refill
Line6 POD Farm
Epiphone Les Paul Custom electric guitar
Audio Technica AT2020 condenser mic

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Notes:

- This is a pretty simple pop song moving along at 120bpm with the same chords for both the verse and chorus:
Am | F | C | G | Am | F | G | G |
The middle 8 slows down slightly, and the chords are:
C | F | C | G | C | F | G | C |

- It's a pretty cheesy sounding progression, but I thought it was right for this one. The arrangement is pretty standard pop stuff - verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middl8/verse/chorus/chorus... I tried to do something a little different by change the lyrics for each chorus and then bringing all the choruses back at the end.

- The bass, piano, and horns all come from Reason's factory patches with strings from the Garritan refill.

- The guitars are all run through the Line6 amp simulator in Record, though I did open the patches in POD Farm and customize them a bit.

- I wanted a drum track, but I haven't been playing lately and the beats I laid down weren't very good. I edited them a bit, and considered dropping them entirely, but decided to leave them in as MIDI data (playing Record's pop kit) with the hopes of improving them later.

- The vocals were recorded in 4 takes (plus a few spot punch-ins) straight through one of my AT2020 condenser mics connected to the FireStudio and into Record and then comped together there (love that comping system now that I've got it figured out). I was going to export the comped vocal, rewired to Live, and treated the vocal with other plugins and then point reimported to Record for the final mix, but I was pretty happy with the initial recording and the reverb and EQ in Record seemed fine to get it to sit okay. My singing could be better, but effects weren't going to fix that and I didn't want to ruin them with overprocessing like I did on "Lord Aggressor" back in May. I don't know if it's Record or that I finally had the mic placed right and the levels set properly on my FireStudio or what, but this is the first time I can remember not feeling like I doubling the vocal tracks would vastly improve the sound.

- The mixing was done entirely within Record's mixer. I didn't master this one much other than to throw one of Reason's default mastering chains on the main out and tweak it a little just to make sure I was getting a decent level. I'd have done mroe if I considered this a finished song/mix.


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