This one was fun even though I didn’t really know how it was going to turn out. Today’s challenge was to create a sad song in a major key.
Why is this a challenge? Because major keys are typically associated with “happy” or “uplifting” melodies, many of which are played in a major scale. Now, since I’m no music theorist or classically trained musician, these words only mean so much to me. What they do mean, however, is a contradiction. Basically, if you combine music and lyrics then one has to sound more upbeat than the other.
I did about four takes total, one rough run, then another three “serious” takes. Also, originally, I had written a bunch of lyrics that rhymed or flowed throughout but, when I sat down to record, it sounded like too much. The lyrics were garbage and would’ve required more work to finesse rather than go with what seemed easier and more appropriate.
When I sat down to record I thought, what is this song really about? It’s not overly clever nor is it complicated in any way, it’s a simple and direct message about backing up your hard drives. It’s something even I neglect to do and keep meaning to set up “later”. Yet the days fly by and the files pile up. The GBs climb and soon I need a new hard drive for whatever reason but, lo and behold, I can’t access the files on the other drive!
***(Is it “harddrive” or “hard drive”? I’ve always spelled it as one word if I don’t simply abbreviate as “hdd”. Or is it “HDD”?)
And how much of this stuff do we need? We don’t realize how much of it we DON’T need but we also don’t appreciate just how much of it we like to have “just in case” until after we can’t get it any more. How much we take for granted that “I’ll write that last paragraph later” or “I’ll print it out later” or “I’ll send it to him/her later” could very well never happen. Even worse, a five minute jobby could take hours because we have to find the back up we last did and then re-do the last few changes we completed before thinking we were finished.
So… back up your hard drives.
I went with spoken word because it sounded good for the occasion and I used the autoplay feature on Garageband’s piano instrument. I switched between the numbers 1 and 4 while also jumping between the G, C and F chords. Since my music theory is rather minimal and my desire to construct a theoretically correct musical structure is, well, absent, I simply pressed random buttons. the machine took care of the rest.
I did three takes and was happy with all of them but decided the third was most descriptive of the bunch. Sadly, since I was paying attention more to pressing buttons and using my Zoom H4n as a recording device, I neglected to record the MIDI on the iPad itself, so I have no “pure” piano or vocal track. They are forever married in one recorded track.
As for effects, I routed the track to a side chain and applied Expansion, Compression (Classic VCA), a Hi Cut 20KHz EQ, and then some ChromaVerb reverb.
And here is a screenshot of the entire project:
And here’s a photo of the artist himself:
So that’s who’s making all that noise? Yup. That’s me.