A cover of "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" From the game Far Cry 5. For context, the song is sung from the point of view of a Christian cult in the USA. This is why the lyrics are just a TAD BIT aggressive.

Keep Your Rifle By Your Side

Cover of The Cup Song from the movie "Pitch Perfect". I went with a depth-over-width sound for this, and with just two parts, it meant a lot of the detail could remain. I learned a lot about compressors as well as how to deal with making parts stand out without touching the gain. 

I like how it came out. I hope to enjoy it!

The Cup Song (From Pitch Perfect)

A cover of Father's Lament by Poor Man's Poison. One of my favorite bands of all time, so please go listen to their other stuff, it's fantastic!

My main focus this month was expanding the width of the song. I feel that all of my past songs have been dynamicly flat, so I wanted to get as much sound as I could from each part without compressing or EQing the quality away. I'm happy with how it turned out, and even got to mess with the panning a bit!

Fathers' Lament

Bo Burnham was the artist that first inspired me to start learning music. As my friends can attest, when I first started learning piano, I would play nothing but Bo Burnham songs. From "Art is Dead" to "Are You Happy" and now, "Goodbye". I've had so much fun playing all of these songs, so I figured I should put one of them on (digital) tape.

For this song, I delved into EQs and went down a rabbit hole of changing tiny parts that made no perceivable difference and yet changed the entire feeling of the song.

As for the mixing, this is one of the hardest ones I've had so far. I'm not sure if it was the instruments, my voice, or the composition, but nothing was working. No matter how hard I worked, nothing sounded how I wanted it to sound. I think this is my knowledge surpassing my skills.

As I do this challenge of One-Song-Per-Month, I'm getting better at mixing and learning more about music and what goes into it. Along with this is learning how hard mixing is. Knowing the sounds you want and knowing how to get it is to very different things, and this cover does not sound how I want it to.

Unlike my previous songs, I don't like this one. To me, it sounds hollow and yet too dense. The highs are too sharp, yet nothing stands out. It sounds like a big contradiction to my ears. But I'm still glad I made it. My next project will be a blank slate to work on and try again to find my sound. Whether that next one will be better, I can only hope so. But I'll never make my great one before I make my next one.

It's been a tough month. Thanks for following along with me, and I hope you enjoy this song, even if I can't right now.

Goodbye

I feel pretty good about this track. I decided to let myself go and focus on having fun while recording more than anything else. I listened to so many different versions of this song looking for ideas, and through sheer osmosis, ideas came pouring out in the recording booth. My goal was to have fun, and I can't count how many times I started rocking out listening to this while mixing.

The song if built around the guitar riff, organ, and drums. If you listen to the original Animals version, these are the predominant voices and are what most people associate with the song nowadays. I put them all through a mid-frequency filter and a bit of harsh compress to give them that old-timey sound, and then built the rest of the song on top of that.

The piano part was inspired by wanting to rock out while trying to play the organ part. I'd have to play softly (ish) while recording, but I just wanted to let out all the energy I was feeling from the song instead. Next thing you know, I made a new track, hit record, and 15 minutes later I had a piano part. I threw in some trills to spice up the chords, but other than that, it's pure energy.

On the last day of recording, I wanted something to punch up the ending. I didn't have any ideas, but I remembered the filters I put on the guitar riff track that gave the extra sound of an electric guitar. Once again, I queued up a recording track, and much to my neighbor's dismay, I had some soaring guitars. From there it was just making a simple melody with the root notes of the chords, and I had my ending.

That being said, I do have some critiques. The guitars at the end are a bit too muddy for my liking. It's had to distinguish them from the piano, and despite as much fussing as I could do, I ended up just turning them down to give space to what mattered. If I had more time I might be able to fine-tune it, but for now, on to the next one!

House Of The Rising Sun

My cover of "The Lazy Song" by Bruno Mars.

I originally had another song planned for this month (Is now planned for next), but while I was falling to make progress on that one, this song kept popping into my head. With a few days left in the month, I decided to give myself a break and put together this nice and easy song.

I recorded both the piano and vocals on the same take (And in the first take too!) to give the song a more genuine feel like a live preformance as opposed to my very broken-up previous songs. I feel this let my voice and the piano play off each other a bit more, leading to a more playful and holistic sound. Some light effects and a little bit of trimming breaths later, and the song was done in just a few hours.

Sometimes, lazyness isn't something to overcome, but an excuse to try something else.

The Lazy Song

A cover of Andrew Barth Feldman's cover of the Hall and Oats song "Man Eater". A challenging song for sure, right on the edge of my vocal range and my piano skills. 

I learned this one almost 6 months ago, but I never felt comfortable enough with it to start recording until 3 months ago. 3 months is a lot longer than I ever want to be working on something, but every time I would start mixing it, it would fall short of my vision and I would lose all motivation to work on it. It was a challenge to finish, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

My favourite part in there is the piano. I've recently fallen back in love with the piano, and I love building on the chords of a song with some improv. I learned how to do it with this song and it's been a staple in my toolbox ever since.

Maneater

Cover of "Accidentally In Love" by The Counting Crows. I've loved this song for a while, learned it YEARS ago, and finally put pen-to-paper-to-microphone to get it recorded. It's such an upbeat song to listen to and play, and when you get the strumming JUST RIGHT, it comes together beautifully.

The number one focus I had while mixing was trying to get the mix, and specifically, the vocals, to sound like the songs that I listen to on Spotify. When I first started mixing, I thought that "quality is king", and I should try to get as much detail as possible out of my voice and into the mix. But in each song I've made, I've pulled away more and more detail and it's sounding better and better. At this point though, I've listened to this song too much to try to improve it any more.

This was also my second attempt at mixing a wider song, the first being "House of the Rising Son". I still like that song, but the mixing just doesn't work. Eagle-eared listeners will know that I mostly produce narrower songs, with just vocals and one or two more parts. This song has 5 tracks total, but I like the balance between them a lot more. I tried to give each track its own frequency in order for them to stick out more, and I'm still on the fence about it. I'll come back to this in a few months and see how I still feel.

Anyway, I'm now hitting a turning point in my music journey. I like producing these songs, but I also want to do more. I've always had the philosophy that if I enjoy what I'm doing, good things will come. And while enjoying my music is still the goal, I've realized that if I want to take my music further, I need a more proactive role. I want to start performing in public, either at open-mic nights near me or just busking on the street. It's time to take my goals seriously and to make an attempt at becoming a musician in more than just my Instagram bio.

We'll see how it goes.

Accidentally In Love

Just a place for me to post whatever project I've recently finished. That's usually a cover of whatever I've been learning on the piano, but hey, sometimes it's original.

Maxx

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