DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This November I’ll spend a weekend recording music with my two JAR bandmates. It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, except that it has happened once already, but you get the idea: joining three people from different parts of the country with the right gear and the right intention and the right preparation takes a lot of work — about 10 months’ worth in my case because I committed to write two songs.

Writing songs is easy for some people. I think Paul Simon can write a song faster than I can write my name. And then he goes on to sell the song for a million dollars, whereas I flip to the next page of the ledger and sign yet another check for, I don’t know, the latest Paul Simon album.

Writing songs is hard for me, because until recently I didn’t play a melodic instrument. (Some would say I still don’t play a melodic instrument.)

Anyway, I’ve completed basic tracks for my first composition, “Ode to Soup.” This is a preproduction demo featuring me on drums and on hammer dulcimer, which is a melodic instrument well-suited to drummers because only two notes can be played at a time.

Ode To Soup demo (May, 2004) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn.)

“Preproduction demo” means the song isn’t finished. It has been shipped off to a man with many basses (with an average of 4.75 strings apiece) for some low-end attention and possible arrangement changes. Following that it will be shipped off to a man with a glow-in-the-dark slug on his guitar in hopes of acquiring — dare I say it? — a melody. Oh, and a big-assed guital solo. Following that we’ll re-record the entire thing, top to bottom, with better recording gear.

Will the song have lyrics? It probably should. One would think I’d be able to string a few words together, but so far this has turned out not to be the case.

As unfinished as it is, this demo is actually the second version of the song I’ve made. The first was composed and recorded in sections, then stitched together in ProTools. I was able to clone and repeat sections to see how they fit together.

This second version brings a big improvement in the quality of the performance and recording. It contains no loops; it’s so sparse and repetitive already, I couldn’t bear to copy and paste entire choruses (as I had the first time around).

The drums on this version were recorded with an electronic drum kit on loan from a friend, who deserves a good musical citizen award for loaning out a percussion instrument (!) to a drummer in need. Using an electronic kit rather than acoustic was easier in some ways and harder in others; I’ll revisit this topic in a future post.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this proto-song grows up. I’ll post additional revisions here over time, and if all goes well, I’ll have a final version in December.