The Murky Waters of Songwriting XXII

Hmm.

I went down to the pub yesterday, got changed and fully prepped for a night of rugby and flowing beer, when my supervisor informed me that I wasn't supposed to be working on saturday. Righty-oh.. so I spent like two hours in the pub sipping on my Kilkenny* (which someone had bought for me, but I hadn't managed to find time to give it a go) and producing a small sketch of the pub's bar back area on a tiny scrap of paper no bigger than the palm of my open hand.

*FYI, Kilkenny is a beer of Irish origin... lighter than Guinness, but it still managed to give me a numb brain after only ONE pint. I'm no great shakes at alcohol, anyway.

So I came home and pulled out my mandolin to owrk out a song based on a small mandolin chord progression which I had come up with last year right after I got back from New Zealand (yes, I'm still whacked about NZ, and you'd be too if you actually went there, of course being an LOTR fan does perpetuate the feeling even more). This riff I had originally recorded down and put under the title of: 'Walking to Franz Josef', after the glacier in the south island. For more details, visit this blog's NZ posts.

Anyway, I sort of came up with the complete structure by 9pm or so last night, and proceeded to cut the Mandolin track.. which I promptly EQed and set as a stereo track (mandolin on left-hand-side, with reverb of the signal on the right).. but I had a lot of trouble with the acoustic guitar track, because the strumming style of the mandolin could not be easily used on an acoustic guiar, I just cut the vocal and bass tracks before working on the acoustic this morning.

I managed to cut the guitar track this morning, but I had to do it twice because the first one wasn't exactly the epitome of a successful guitar track. Anyway, I just did the same job like what I did with the mandolin track, only that the guitar was now on the right channel, and the reverb signal was on the left.

Using this configuration, I sort of created a 'live' feel, because the mandolin's reverb signal is underneath the acoustic guitar, and vice versa... it was a rather successful attempt despite the to instruments are only a titch one of timing with each other in certain places. In fact, this song (now titled 'Sound of Promise') is so high-energy, it can match 'Introduction' for a high-energy song.

I'm now contemplating putting thsi song on the blog now... ok fine, I'll do it anyway.


Cheers,

Crawldaddy