Sometimes the story behind a piece of music is more interesting than the music itself. The pieces that are the focus of this blog entry are one such case. Parts of them come from my first album project, and some comes from 2016, a decade later. I wasn't able to finish the original versions of the songs back in the day; my skill set hadn't reached the point where I could get every instrument around the fact that the beat does get turned around yet still lands in a usable space.
Back in 2006, I was relying exclusively on loops to create drum tracks. The one under this song had obvious potential, being a good mid-tempo beat with some funk to it. It was all about diversity back then, trying out as many different styles and genres as I felt comfortable with, so this one would go well used in a Memphis R & B mold. The end material was envisioned to be used as background music for videos, so I didn't want the lead instrument to be too intrusive.
The process was to make the drum part, based on my knowledge of how a typical song would work. There is usually a twelve bar structure, and then maybe a middle eight, which doesn't necessarily need to be eight bars, but shifts the beat and tone half way through to create another point of interest. Then you go back to the original twelve bars and finish. These are cliches, easy to manipulate if you have the rudimentary skill set to do it. I thought that I did and I was proven wrong on this song.
The first thing after getting four or so minutes of drums - in isolation back then, not the smartest move in retrospect - was to lay down some instrument to fill in a chord structure. In this case, it was an electric guitar, my Stratocaster in Curtis Mayfield / Steve Cropper mode. I didn't own a bass at the time, although I had played for decades, so I tried to fake a bass line on a cheap Casio keyboard using the acoustic bass setting. That is where the problem set in; it seemed like the guitar fit the drums, but when the bass was added, it all went sideways during the middle eight.
I ditched that version, but unfortunately in retrospection I did not ditch the keyboard bass part. Still, all was not lost; trying many different options, there was a final version with an organ in support and my Dobro playing a very different lead part over the same chord structure, called 'Coustic'. It was my first attempt at an acoustic recording instead of a direct patch electric instrument. It was a struggle, especially using whatever cheap garbage I was using for a mic at the time. I finally did get it, playing as hard as I could as close to the mic as possible.
There still was a problem with transitioning the song out of the middle eight; the instruments all went out of sync at the same time. My solution back in 2006 was to simple cut off the end, looping the beginning one more time. It did the trick, concluding the song with what was essentially a cheat. This song had been a pain in the ass with more work in the post-production, mixing and editing than in the actual recording, but I had achieved my original goal of diversity, even if the track came out very different than I had envisioned. And I had done my first recording with an acoustic guitar, although there were years of work before I could get a decent ambient acoustic sound out of a spare bedroom. So the process was not a loss, just a lot of effort.
Fast forward to 2016. After my sixty - that is a six followed by a zero - song session in 2014, I took a year off. The main reason was that I was afraid that I was getting a musical version of obsessive compulsive disorder. Another reason was that I had destroyed my kick drum pedal in the process of doing so many tracks. It was harder to fix than anticipated, with no replacement available and attempts at repair failing. So I did the next best thing, which was to go back into my files and try to remix and improve some of my early material before 2010. It was recording, mostly remixing, and I didn't need a drum kit to do it, limiting my repair work to guitar, keyboards, and a lot of bass guitar re-inserted into the multi-tracks.
The folders from those early projects often didn't have names and the files were all over the place. Since I was consolidating all my data and sorting through it, the recording files were fairly minor compared to the general volume. Not everything exists in raw form, especially from the earliest days, but I plowed through and found a whole lot more than I expected. One folder, containing many raw files including outtakes and unused bits, was the 'Coustic / Soul Hole' sequence, so it was one of the ninety or so I tried to remix. Not everything was successful, but that one I could re-sync.
On all the early material, I no longer use or own a license for the software that it was originally mixed on. That means that the mixing file, which I did save, was useless, since it would not import into my new audio software. I usually don't bother to write down the beats-per-minute, which makes using a click track next to impossible. If the various layers - drums, bass, keyboards, guitar- don't have a common point, usually at the beginning, it can be fruitless trying to get the pieces to match up together.
But 'Coustic' matched up, and I gave it a listen. By silencing various layers, I isolated my original version, finding out that the drums were not the problem, as I originally had thought. The Dobro did in fact play in time until the end. The bass and organ lost the beat three quarters of the way through. So I re-recorded both those instruments, using my Fender Jazz for the bass part, and came up with a new, improved version of 'Coustic'.
This is the first music video that I have done exclusively for this blog. I'm not going to throw up a slide show or just one still image. The video was done in less than an hour, using some footage from the Prelinger Archives as well as overlays from an obscure Eastern European film. Since the song is a pastoral American piece, I kept it simple. If any of the images make sense to you, it is completely accidental.
Back in 2016, rooting around that folder, I found that I still had that original Stratocaster track to the drums. It synced, and it was in time right up to the end. I tried my new bass line, and it matched very well. In fact, it might be the best song that came out of what I named the 'Big Addendum', a five album project that revised much of my beginner's material from the first eight albums. There is a guitar track from 2006 playing along to a bass line from 2016, all over a drum loop created in Adobe Audition. But it works, and here it is.
Again, the video was done in a couple of hours or less. I had a great deal of insect footage from (I believe) the Prelinger Archive, so for whatever reason I thought that it would be a perfect background for some Southern Fried Soul. A couple of overlays, a couple of effects, and it's on YouTube, not really meant to mean anything, just eye candy to accompany the music. But it's interesting, and the music would make an effective soundtrack to the appropriate film.
I try very hard not to repeat myself with my music. This may be my only case of using parts of one song to create another, although the origin story as outlined above shows that 'Soul Hole' was actually my original intention. Yet the lead instrument playing makes the songs feel very different. The Dobro and organ lean into the beat, slowing it down, making it more smooth. The electric guitar whips against the beat, increasing the funk, emphasizing the groove. It only took a decade to get either version anywhere near correct.
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