This one was a bit tricky because I started to read up on minor keys and then decided I didn’t want to learn any more music theory for the moment. Instead, I went with what was much more readily available and that was my voice:
The idea behind this challenge, in my mind, was to create something that may sound as if it isn’t joyful but, in fact, it is. My first intuition was to look at Ukrainian folk songs since a lot of them are played in A minor, which would fit the bill. The problem with those, however, is finding an appropriate song. Since I have some difficulty figuring out a key from sheet music alone, this presented a bit of a challenge.
I then went over to the iPad to see what I could put together on the guitar. It sounded decent enough but I was lacking any real lyrics or anything to say.
When I started writing down ideas for lyrics the first thing that came to mind was the night time. A lot of people would consider night time as dark and not uplifting. But, in my own experience, whether it’s really late at night or really early in the morning, night time has always had a type of serenity to it, a calm and quiet. So I went with that.
The lyrics took the longest to figure out because I didn’t really know what to say about the night. It’s quiet, nobody’s around, you can think and clear your mind. More than likely you’ll go to sleep or get up early, both of which give you some quiet before the day really starts. And we all hope to sleep well and one of the things that helps us sleep is deep sleep wherein we dream.
I recorded a few different takes of some words that came to mind. I tried to keep it short and to the point and didn’t aim for any sort of rhyming scheme.
But the words weren’t matching the music I was also trying to lay down. Then I thought, if I’m doing spoken word, could my voice be in a minor key yet the content be considered happy?
I went with that rationale and so, instead of the guitar, decided to record some of the night sounds outside of my apartment. The wind was pretty strong last night and so I was able to capture some of that whipping wind that is often used in the movies. The wind samples that come with Logic were over the top type of stuff, good if you need the effect in the background, but not so good if it’s almost front and centre of the track.
Now, the problem I had in recording my own wind is that there is a lot of noise. You’ll see in the Mixer image below that I applied quite a few plugins to try to kill the noise, and yet I still wasn’t able to completely remove it. Had I gone with the Logic samples I wouldn’t have this problem but then I’d have a standard effect rather than something a bit more lively. The result is more noise than I’d like but it’s not overbearing.
For vocals, I put one some echo and reverb, both of which were derived from the guitar channel strip imported from the Garageband project.
I left everything front and centre in this track. I was thinking of panning the vocals just slightly off to the side so they “ping pong” back and forth and that might work.
Overall, the track doesn’t exactly fit the description of the challenge but, given that my throat is acting up at the moment, I’ll did what I could. Besides, I didn’t want to have to study a lot of music theory just to get one track done as I’m finding that I’m spending a lot of time reading and not actually producing anything. So, if I had to, I’d retitle this challenge to something like “Spoken Word, Natural Sounds”.