It might be country, but......

[teb]

....there are no references to trains, prison, Mama, pickup trucks, rain, etc. I finished the lyrics yesterday afternoon, turned on the recorder and did the first run-through/demo of the whole tune in one live take while trying to read the words and chords scribbled on a legal pad because my printer is out of ink. It's kind of long, kind of rough, kind of noisy and I had to fingerpick my acoustic six-string for the whole song, which I dread slightly more than getting a double root canal. I used the closest available pre-fabricated drum loop, just to hold the tempo and add a little texture, though we were having storms yesterday and the power was flickering which wobbled it slightly in a couple spots Other than all that stuff, it's fine, and will work for demo purposes.

The harmonies are made by a TC Helicon "Voice Live" stomp-box processor that I picked up cheap a couple weeks ago because it's been replaced in their line with a newer model. This is the first thing I've recorded with it and it's pretty cool. You program the voicings you want and it's kind of like the inflatable autopilot limo driver in "Men In Black II" - only when you push the button on the Voice Live, Crosby and Nash pop up. There is a short space for an instrumental and I'm thinking maybe a little Allison Krause-style, low fiddle for that spot and also a little bit trailing out at the end of the tune. My synthesizer didn't have any fiddles that sounded believable, so it will wait for the real recording (plus, it's really hard to bow the black keys). Somehow, I don't get the feeling that I'll be able to fit my typical double-tracks of jangling 370/12s into this arrangement, but you never know..... Oh well, CDs need quiet songs, too.

The demo is here:
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... See-er.mp3

[kiramdear]

Nice song, Todd, and nicely played. David and Graham sound good, too.

Seriously, I enjoy your songs - your lyrics are always thoughtful and sweet and remind me of the well-crafted songs I grew up with in the olden days.

[teb]

Thanks Kira, here at "Old Hippy Music" we aim to please and at least try to write lyrics that mean something and can maybe even be understood when listening to the song. I'm amazed when I see big-time celebs on these end-of-season award shows, singing their hits. In a lot of cases, for much of the song you can't even tell what language they're singing - and if you can make out the lyrics, they're often shallower than the kiddie pool.

I actually did a sample chunk of this tune in a more rocky format and it works pretty well and has a nice groove. The guitars are my 340/12 on the right side (neck pickup only, JangleBox on bright, treble rolled back a bit on the amp with just big strums) my Martin twelve on the left side and the Hofner V63.
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... t%20Y2.mp3

I'll mull it over for a week or so before I start cutting cleaner tracks, but I have a feeling I'll just go with the sparse acoustic version, add some really subtle percussion and find a fiddle player to add a couple of lines to the break. There is something about the starkness of that version that I like, even if it does mean attempting five minutes of steady fingerpicking on a six string without screwing up.

[kiramdear]

There's a lot to be said for starkness and clarity. Look at artists like Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell or even Jim Croce or John Prine, you know the rest, not to mention Lennon and McCartney, strong lyricists who all know or knew how to write songs that really play themselves, almost, and the best you can do is to give them plenty of space and not get in the way.

[winston]

Todd that song is brilliant. I absolutely loved it. The harmonies are amazing. Is that rig easy to use?

[Scastles]

I liked everything about the song. A piece of work that fits my ears. Well done!
The Voice Live is an amazing apparatus, but wow, it comes with a hefty price tag, at least for me.

[jimk]

I really like that song, too. The Rick 12 of course really hit me in that emotional place where I live, and love that kind of music. In fact, it sounds like the kind of song I'd like to cover.

About that Live Voice contraption: is there a website? I'd like to read a little more about it. It sounds like a really neat gizzmo.
JimK

P.S. I'm not sure why, but the lyric rather reminds me of something Gene Clark might have written.

[Scastles]

About that Live Voice contraption: is there a website? I'd like to read a little more about it. It sounds like a really neat gizzmo.
JimK

I had the same curiosity, Jim.

You can read about it here. I suppose it's the same.

http://www.tc-helicon.com/voicelive2.asp

[jimk]

What a neat little gizzmo! Boy I could sure see using that in creating demos of the songs I write.
JimK

[johneek]

Really nice stuff Todd....Thanks for sharing that with us.

[teb]

The Voice Live II is the current (upgraded and fairly pricey) version of what I have. It looks like they introduced it while a lot of dealers still had inventory of the original Voice Live model (the one I have), so dealers were unloading the old ones pretty cheap. I paid about $300 for it. I had been using my TC Helicon "Harmony G" (two voices that follow your guitar chords to know where to go with the harmony) for a while and the Voice Live was a step up from it. I find them to be a great creative tools. Here is the original Voice Live video that convinced me to buy one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_gVaAPLYBE

I'm just scratching the surface of how this thing works, but essentially you can program up to four voices to follow your lead vocal, either from their pre-set menu or customize your own. You assign gender, vibrato, volume, what notes above or below you each one will sing (thirds, fifths, etc.) and a whole bunch of other paramters. You can have several harmony modes programmed for a particular tune if the song has differing sections that go from major to minor, different numbers of back-up parts, etc. Then it has pretty good voice-thickening and various effects you can add. You also have the ability to alter timing and pitch accuracy of your back-up singers a little bit, so that they don't sound too mechanically perfect to be realistic. If you isolate the harmony voices, I can't really say that they sound terribly realistic, but they sound pretty darned good in the mix.

I don't know how one is supposed to write songs, but what I do is plug a guitar into the amp's line-out, volume off, and then into the recorder while wearing headphones. I start playing random chord patterns. At the same time, I'm usually mumbling nonsense lyrics or humming into the mic with some sort of harmony pattern running and looking for a hook - some phrase or turn that catches my attention and might be turned into part of a new verse or chorus. The harmony machines can make these sound really nice and give me a much better idea of what that little chunk of song could sound like. It's all a matter of finding one and then building on it. My wife will stick her head in the room and I'll be sitting there playing an unamplified electric guitar and quietly mumbling nonsense and she'll give me a funny look. Then I hand her the headphones and suddenly she understands what I'm doing.

The biggest complaint I have with either the Harmony G or the Voice Live is a bit of bleed-over if you're playing and singing at the same time. I don't sing very loud and the mic will pick up a little bit of guitar noise, which will then also get harmonized and it sounds pretty strange. For live demos like this one, I don't worry too much about it. For serious recordings, the Voice Live will allow me to do the guitar and vocals individually.

[winston]

Thanks for the run down Todd, that sounds like a great piece of gear to have in the tool kit. I will have to investigate further based on what I heard here. Those harmonies sound amazing and your song is just beautiful. Great work. I played it for my wife and she loved it too

[walker]

Very nice, Todd. It's been said that "they don't write 'em like they used to" but it's refreshing to hear that some still do! This song might be country, but it might be other things as well. I do hear the strong folk & soft rock elements coming through as well, and your programming of the voc harms really does give it the CSN feel. Sort of like Crosby & Nash sat in with Gene Clark? It would also be interesting to hear you re-record the harmony vocals singing the parts yourself, or sang by other real voices as opposed to the Helicon. I like your idea of adding the violin lines - sounds great in my head!

singed?

sung?

[teb]

Thanks Mark. I don't know what we'll do with this one yet. I've tweaked about all I can get out of this demo version and the next step is to start over with a better guitar track, probably played by one of the other guys in the band that actually knows how to fingerpick. I've always been a bass player and though I can play twelve-string decently, I've just never had much of a feel for six-string guitars (ever notice that the forgot to put the octave strings on those things, and that there are big gaps between the strings?) I think I''ll also pick the tempo up just a hair. In the mean time, we're going over the lyrics, looking for lines that are clunkers. The choruses are so long on this one that there is very little time left to set up the verses and tell the story and make the whole song mean anything, so the lyrics have to be as short and sweet as possible. Once the basic and lyrics are done, I can concentrate on cutting a separate, cleaner vocal.

No official plan yet for the harmonies - but trust me, you REALLY don't want to hear me try to sing them...... I have my doubts whether anybody in the band can still sing that high and I'm not sure they would have the same effect if brought down an octave, so the box may be the only good way to do it. It's also very difficult to get the phrasing tight enough when we're recording long distance without face-to-face contact or a chance to sing and rehearse the parts at the same time. When we record, we have people sending in tracks from Philly, Seattle, San Francisco, Nashville, Chicago and me here in Wisconsin which makes tight harmonies quite a challenge. You're sitting there blind with headphones on as you cut your part, trying to remember (or guess) exactly when the next word is supposed to start.

I sure there are those who might object to generating parts of your vocal sound with a mechanical device, but my feeling on the box is that if it allows me or us to do something that makes the tune sound better, I don't have a problem with it. In the same way, I don't object to guitar players using stomp boxes to generate the sound they're looking for, or with using my synthesizer to occasionally manufacture instruments that we don't have. Case in point: A month or so ago, I arranged the instrumentation for a little tune that one of our guys penned, mostly just for fun and to see what I could come up with. I had the vocal track and his strummed acoustic guitar from the demo to start with. I added a bass line with the Hofner and then decided to see what sort of build I could make - so I added seven synthesizer tracks. It was actually pretty funny, since I don't know anything about music theory, don't read music, and don't know how to play keyboards. I just hunted and pecked the parts that I "wrote" and marked all the keys that I would need for each part with little bits of colored tape for the "performance". This is a sample chunk with the last section of just the instrumental track. Other than the acoustic guitar and bass, it's all manufactured synthetic stuff. Is it fake music? I don't know....but it sounds like real music to me. It will probably never get used on the "official" recording of that tune, but it sure was fun to do.
sample:
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... nstMix.mp3

[walker]

No objection here to the use of the synthesized voice box, or how one achieves the sound they're going for on a recording. I think that hearing real voices doing the same lines generated by the Helicon would make a good A & B listen just for the sake of comparison. The Helicon so far has proven to sound realistic, and a great alternative to the "real thing" especially given the proximity barriers within your band.