Songwriting

On Saturday, I spent a delightful afternoon with my twelve year old daughter helping her to record a song. I've dabbled in this a little in the past, but without any success.  I've owned a cassette based 4-Track, an Atari ST with a dodgy copy of Cubase. I had Cubase lite on a 486 PC with an expensive but ultimately crap sound card. I bought a full copy of Cubase on a Mac running OS9 and pretty much failed to get it do do anything. I dabbled with Soundtrack Pro and Garageband. I have Garageband and Intua Beatmaker on my phone.

I can use music software in the same way as I can use a camera: I know enough of the technical details to get by, but I am largely devoid of talent. Both musical and visual.

In photography, I learned that my wife has a natural eye for picture, but no interest in the technical aspects of the camera. We make a reasonable team. She'll give me some indication of what she wants to do, I adjust the camera, she frames the shot and presses the shutter release.

A similar thing happened with my daughter and her song. She wandered into the living room at about 1PM and announced that she had written a song. I somewhat condescendingly asked her to play it for me. She did … quite badly … stumbling over the lyrics and with far too much right-hand damping as she strummed.  What was interesting is that she'd pretty much mastered the few chords I'd taught her a while back, discovered a few more, and strung them together into two distinct sequences.

I suggested that we record it. I launched Garageband. I asked her to play the song while I figured out the tempo and then we looked for a drum pattern that matched reasonably well. I picked a simple MIDI bass pattern that went with both. We worked though the first chord sequence to adjust the pitch of the bass to match. We repeated this for the second chord sequence and spent a remarkably small amount of time adjusting the number of bars of each. We had the foundations of the demo sorted.

Next we recorded her playing the guitar into my laptop's built-in mic. The first attempt was aborted early when I could see that the signal was too weak.  I adjusted the recording level and we the first sequence again, this time successfully.

My daughter's strumming is a bit erratic. The timing and clarity aren't consistently good, but we were able to pick the best 4 bars and copy and paste these.  We did the same for the second sequence.

I was quite careful at this point not to criticise.  Had it been my song a couple of years ago, I'd have probably spent the rest of the day trying to capture a better guitar part.  I've been listening to the wonderfully prolific Billy Childish recently though, and I've come around to the idea that getting a lot of songs done roughly is far better than perfecting just a few.

Next up were the vocals. The laptop mic was used again. My daughter sang the whole thing start to finish in one take. No getting lost, no problem with the timing into and out of the bridge, finishing at the right point too.

We then spent a bit of time mucking about with the software. We put pitch correction up to the max, tried all the vocal presets, changed the tempo.  Her pitch was pretty good for the most part, but she liked the effect of the pitch correction, so we kept that.

The song began at 100bpm. Adjusting the tempo of audio tracks works best at multiple values. I ramped it up to 200bpm. "I like it like that!", she exclaimed. The guitar sounded fine, the the vocals did not.

We recorded the vocals again at 200bpm.  Again, just the one take. There are some mistakes, some practice and more takes would no doubt fix these problems, but we were enjoying ourselves too much to worry about them. I adjusted the levels a little, and we had ourselves a song.

Knowing that multi-tracking the vocals to add depth/chorusing/richness is a common technique, I un-muted the original (now playing at 2x) vocal to see how it would sound. We got a lucky. The timing was different, so it sounded like two distinct voices singing different but complementary things. With the original vocal's level reduced so that it's not fighting, we ended up with quite a cool result:

Bowser.mp3

The song is about an unloved character in the Mario games. For bit more fun, my daughter wanted pictures of the character in a slideshow along with the music.  Five minus in Google images and 5 more in Final Cut produced something she added to her Facebook page that she was delighted with.

I have an old mixer and a condenser mic.  I just ordered a mic stand and XLR cable. Hopefully we can take the song and record it again, but do a better job and take a little more care.  If she wants to to a rough job on entirely different song though, that's fine with me. Just like with my wife and the camera, my daughter can tell me what she wants to do, and I'll help out with the technical side until she can get the hang of it herself.