The Year of Twelve Songs, Pt 5
House of Cards
This Month’s Song
I always wanted to build a song around a gambling or card playing theme. Like The Gambler by Kenny Rogers, or Deal by the Grateful Dead. I love those kind of songs.
I wrote House of Cards back in the 1980s, in various stages of addiction, sobriety, homelessness and relapse. I went through one of those cliche druggie sequences where I lost my job, my apartment, my girlfriend, etcetera. Then I left my home town to clean up, drove to San Diego to get my girl back, that didn’t work, got drunk, went to jail in Santa Barbara, lived in my car for a while, sold the car for drug money, lived in a dive motel, played music on the street, went broke, found a wallet, bought a bus ticket to see my sister in Lodi, worked graveyards at the newspaper there, then moved to Red Bluff, where I finally finished the lyrics to this song one night in a phone booth outside a liquor store after drunk-dialing the girl that left.
At least I got a song out of it!
It’s now the oldest song I’ve written which I still play. I made a video of it several years ago, very early on in my attempts at multi-track home recording. This is a slower version with more emphasis on the lyrics, and hopefully a better performance all around. And a better recording.
As always, thanks for listening. And I’d love to hear what you think out there!
Performance & Production
A pretty straight-forward thing this time. I was recently inspired by that classic Jeff Buckley version of Cohen’s Hallelujah, not lyrically or whatever, but sonically. In that cut, Buckley sings and plays electric guitar, and that’s it. There’s no other instrumentation. So I was going for that kind of sparse clarity in the beginning of my work on this song, but then couldn’t resist adding a few accents on lead guitar and harmonica. Still, no drums or bass or anything else. Just wanted the story to sit on top and out front.
I’m currently using a couple of plug-ins that are very helpful in the mixing process. I’m getting much better results on my vocals using CLA Vocals from Waves. I find you still have to use your ears and tweak knobs, but the presets in CLA Vocals are a great place to start. I’m also mixing entirely with headphones now, using a plug-in that simulates the Abbey Road Studio mixing room. This is a great alternative to mixing in a untreated spare bedroom studio with mid-level monitors. I still check the mix on the monitors in the final stages of the process, but using the headphones and Abbey Road plug-in has really improved my results. It might be considered cheating by some, but that’s okay with me!
I have spent countless hours on YouTube watching videos about all aspects of home recording. Like everything else on YouTube, some sources are better than others. You can waste a lot of time! Two of the best guys I’ve found are Colin Cross for GarageBand, and Joe Gilder for general recording and production.
Gear & Software
(Tech shit)
Guitar: Taylor T5z
Harmonica: Lee Oskar Db
Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3
Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com
Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface
Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones
Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones
PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors
PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone
Beautiful song, Roy <3