The Year of Twelve Songs
A Musical Learning Journey
THE GOAL: A new music video every month in 2024.
THE EASY PART: I’ve already written the songs.
THE HARD PART: Everything else.
I’m a sixty-something, mostly self-taught, amateur wannabe with some songs I want to share—and eventually leave behind.
These songs tell the stories of my life, sometimes quite literally, sometimes less so. But I hope others can find something of their own story in there. I think that’s why we do art of any kind—to connect, right?
I’ve played around with home recording now and then, and while the basic technology is approachable enough, mastery is a much bigger challenge. At one point I gave up and paid for some time at a local recording studio, but my lack of experience was costing too much money.
Now I’m back in the spare bedroom with my instruments and my desk and bookshelves, where I also work on my novel and other writing projects, and where I pay bills and spend too much time on Facebook and YouTube. And I’m making myself a promise—that’s the way I want to look at it—a promise to produce twelve song videos, one each month, and not only leave a record of the songs themselves but also get better at the music and the technology in the process.
As a musician, I’m starting off with limited talent, training and experience. I mean, I’ve been playing at it a long time, but I’m by no means a pro. With the recording technology, I’m still pretty much a newbie, with nothing but YouTube videos and my ears for guidance. So, I invite you to tag along on the journey, see/hear how it goes, comment, commiserate, encourage, advise, question, critique or simply listen. And, along with the music itself, I’ll try share some of whatever I learn. Here we go.
The First Video
Maybe it’s weird to start off with a song called Finish Strong, but that’s where we start, because this song embodies the spirit of this whole project.
I’ve written a number of sad songs about regret, but this is not one of them. This is more of an anthem, a pep talk if you will, for me and anyone else who needs reminding that, no matter the past, all the missed chances, the failures and wrong turns, the knockdowns and dragouts, we can still shake it off, get up from the floor and Finish Strong.
I wrote the song in 2022, at the tail end of a three-year losing streak that included a botched surgery that almost killed my wife, kept her in various hospitals for months, and forced her into retirement, and us into a downsized life, all followed closely by the pandemic, which eventually killed my own small business thanks to the extended shutdowns. But we came through all of that with a new appreciation for our love and partnership, and with the attitude that change offers opportunity. And I guess it also caused me to reflect on old regrets and second chances.
Lyrically, the song is three verses, each followed by a chorus, with the last chorus extended with repeats—a really traditional folky structure I think. The boxing and nightfall metaphors in the first and last verses respectively are sort of comfortably cliche I’d say. The middle verse is just a little more unique, and it somewhat obliquely references my prose writing pursuits. The chorus is full of common exhortations we all at times tell ourselves, and the familiarity of it all is what I’m going for, because the reason we say these things over and over is because we need to hear them. Over and over. So, I hope that all helps the song land in the hearts of a listener or two.
Musically, it’s a fairly simple three-chord song in the key of G, with only slight variations in the progression. I use some hammer-ons and pull-offs to add spice to the changes but it’s still centered on the I, IV, V chords, in this case G/C9/D. And I arpeggiate and sometimes play partial chords to provide accents at different places. That probably only interests any guitar players out there, but there ya go.
Performance, Gear and Tech
(if you’re into that sort of thing)
It’s just me on guitar, vocal, harmonicas and digital bass.
Guitar: Taylor American Dream Grand Theater
Harmonicas: Brendan Power Lucky 13, key of C; Lee Oskar, key of Am
Digital bass: GarageBand Sounds Library/Upright Studio Bass, operated via Apple’s Musical Typing
Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface
Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones
PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors
PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone
Tonor Q9 USB Condenser Microphone
Apple iPhone X
Production Notes
(if you’re all the way down the rabbit hole)
The guitar and vocal was recorded live on video, straight into iMovie on iPhone with the Tonor USB mic. This was something I hadn’t tried in previous experiments, an effort to capture a more organic feel, and (truthfully) to make up for my inexperience with playing to a click track or drum track in perfect time, which is something I want to improve on through the course of this project. That audio was then Air-dropped to the MacBook and moved into GarageBand.
The low and high harmonica parts were each recorded separately with the PreSonus mic, into GarageBand via the Scarlett interface. I’d wanted to try the two-harmonica effect on something for a while. My vision was to use the Lucky 13 to help hold down the low end of the rhythm, and the Lee Oskar minor harp to add accents and the main solo.
But the Lucky 13 didn’t feel low enough, so I added the bass track, which was created as a software instrument in GarageBand and input through Musical Typing—something I’d never tried before. I’m not a bass player and was really stretching on this. I knew that the bass traditionally hits the root note of the chords in time with the changes, and I’d seen the Musical Typing thing used in a YouTube, so I watched a couple vids on it and went for it—with modest and limited success I’d say. It was the second-to-last last track added and, if I wasn’t pushing my self-inflicted deadline, I probably would’ve redone it. But that’s the point of the project—to force me to finish the songs, right?
My mixing knowledge is rudimentary, although I’ve recently started a paid online course on mixing in GarageBand. But for this song I mixed all the tracks using GarageBand stock presets, then applied tweaks to the presets to satisfy my own ears. Example: since the vocal and guitar were bound on the same track, I duplicated the track and applied the Classic Vocal preset to one track and the Acoustic Guitar Natural Strum to the other, then panned them to 10 and 2 o’clock to widen the mix. I also duplicated the lower harmonica track and applied two different presets to get slight distortion and as much bass as I could.
And I used the ‘automation' feature to raise and lower volume on certain segments of tracks to add to the dynamics of the song—for instance upping the volume on the A-minor harmonica track just for extra punch during the solo, then lowering it for the rest of the song. Automation is another feature I’d seen in videos but never tried to tackle before.
The final touch was adding the boxing bell sound effect at the end of the song. I had this in my mind even before I started to record the song, but didn’t know if I could pull it off. I got the sound from a video, moved it to GarageBand, edited it to my ear, then fussed with the timing of it until I liked it. I just thought it would be cool. Ding-ding-ding, the fight is over!
Well, February is a short month, with my team playing in Super Bowl in the middle, so I better get to work on the next song, and soon.
Whoever’s out there, big big thanks for listening, reading, liking, sharing, commenting, subscribing or just lurking. And even bigger, huger, gigantic thanks to my paid subscribers for your support. You keep me going.
Remember, in the words of The Grateful Dead…
“Without love in the dream, it’ll never come true.”
This looks awesome!