This having to work for a living really cuts down on my lifestyle.......but I can still do some work in spite of that.................
Sometimes I think I lead a weird life. Working for a company where I can work at home if need be sounds nice, unless what you do entails having to stay up and do some work starting at 1:00 am. Since I was at the computer anyway, and it was only midnight, I decided to do some work. The last session I recorded my little inspiration for the refrain for this song, so now I set to work writing the music for this.
All day in my head, when it had a chance to think about music, I kept hearing the music for this refrain, with almost a little Spanish feel to it. To start I needed at least a marker beat, so I copied the kick drum pattern I had written from the verse. Next I wrote a simple bassline to work with this. I should say at this point that I had already recorded the refrain vocal twice, but now I realized that I would need yet another scratch vox, since I had just sung those takes acapella, and the timing was not exactly spot on.
I record the vox again, then search out a good tone on the DX100 and lay down a simple arpeggio. Next I copy this and move it down an octive. I move this new part over the old one, and then instead of lining it up exactly, make it a tick or two later than the other part, for a bit of choursing. Last thing is to take a increase the durations of the notes by 200% - a simple thing to do in Sonar.
Now that I have this basic chorus, I drop it into the rest of the arrangement. This seems to work well with everything.
I have Barbara come down and snag a listen. She really likes the melodies, the drums., the jazzy feel these parts has. She is not so convinced about the repeating synth parts or the refrain music I have written.
You know I respect her ears, and sometimes I would just as soon move on during a piece, but it is true that this song has changed so much over the course of a few days that it may be I need to rewrite some of these parts. Since I had snagged an existing riff off the EA1 for the synth parts, thats no biggie. I may also tweak the bass line a bit, at her suggestion, since its simply a big fat sinewave, and now may be the time to push this thing further towards the jazz camp with something a little cripser. As always the rule for me, make it better and discard what isn't working.
In spite of that I will be making a copy of this song which still has all the original material, and get rid of all the vox parts and just leave the first things that came out, just so I can remember.
You gotta love having storage space!