Hello all.
It’s been a few months since Some Say Love was released back in July. It got some good responses on ReverbNation, and a reasonable number of streams on Youtube and Spotify. A pleasing result for someone who does this purely for fun and doesn’t do marketing or social media.
In the meantime, I’ve been working on two songs that I wrote, recorded and mixed in parallel. The idea was that focusing on one would give me a break from the other (and vice versa), and it kinda sorta worked. Another reason for working on both together was that the two songs are related; they’re both about those Big Moments in life when change comes at you like a broadside accident (quoting Joni Mitchell1).
So here’s the first of the two, Pour Me Another One, available on Spotify and YouTube. It’s about coming to (or being pushed to) the realization that something needs to give. The words don’t say much about the singer’s situation or what’s happening, and that’s intentional. I like writing more ambiguous lyrics that let the listener fill in the blanks.
Although… during the mixing stage, when I was listening back to the song, I realised that there’s at least one another, entirely unintended way of understanding the words; as those of a tired and jaded hooker. That’s nothing to do with what I meant it to say, but I suppose it goes to show that it’s up to listeners to interpret a song.
Rules
As usual, I set myself some extra rules for this one:
Only one guitar, a piano, a bass, and drums. That’s all. Oh, and strings. And a harmonica. But it’s still quite a lot simpler than most mothershout arrangements.
Only one vocal - no harmonies! I love writing vocal harmonies, so I chose to limit myself to one voice as a challenge.
That voice has to be bluesy and jazzy. This is not a straight pop song. We need blueish notes and careful timing.
Put the piano up front and have the guitar in a supporting role. I’m a better guitarist than a pianist, so this was to force myself to practice the piano part a lot.
Origins
I’ve had versions of this song in my head for years. Some of the words come from those early drafts; my favourite line is it’s not my kind of music / though I hear what it’s saying / I don’t believe it to be true. When I came to write down a definitive version, I took all the better bits from all the old versions, jazzed up the chords (see the section below on harmony) and changed the key to suit the voice. Changing the key has quite an effect on the guitar part, because there are only so many ways to play a chord on the guitar, but that can be liberating. You can’t play it the way you used to, so you have to come up with something new.
It’s not a happy song, and that’s intentional. But then again, it’s not really sad. I guess what I was going for was resigned, and maybe tired. It’s a very allegorical, really not literal, obliquely referential retelling of something that happened in my life, though it didn’t happen in a bar, in December, at four in the morning.
But enough with the artistic nonsense. Let’s have some details on how it was made.
Recording
The Basics
As much as I could, I played each part all the way through the song. I’m trying to get the feel and sound of a band playing, and not to do the more modern thing of capturing a few seconds of each performance and loop or repeat them through the track. It took an afternoon or recording for each of the guitar, piano and bass, doing multiple takes of each and then picking the best take. That best take might then be edited to fix the most glaring mistakes, but I tried to leave them as untouched as I could get away with.
I’ve settled on a workflow that I like, and it goes something like this:
Write the song first, with only a guitar and/or piano and a notebook; no computer.
When I have it written, map it out in Logic Pro. That means laying out the various sections; intro, verse 1, chorus 1, bridge, solo and so on, so that I have an overall “map” of the song.
Create a basic drum track (to be replaced later) so that I have something to play along with.
Record a guide bass track (also to be replaced later) as a foundation.
Add a first draft of the vocals, because they’re the focus of the song, and hearing them as I record other instruments helps me figure out an arrangement that supports them rather than obscuring or clashing with them.
Record the other instruments (one at a time, obviously, because there’s only one of me). I’ll often record a draft take of each one so that I can hear the whole song, and then replace them one by one with the final versions.
Once everything’s recorded, build a “static mix” that gets everything in more-or-less the right balance (how loud the different instruments are, and where they’re panned in the stereo space).
Listen back to the mix, make notes, revise the mix. Repeat until it’s Good Enough (because it will never be perfect).
“Master” it2; this is the final process of setting the track’s overall loudness and dynamics, and frequency balance. Most of this time is spent in making very small tweaks and trying hard to hear if they made any difference, while worrying about being judged.
Release it so that I can stop worrying about it. Release marks the point where I try to stop thinking about whether it sounds good enough and start agonizing about what the artwork should look like.
That Harmonica
I got the vocal melody early on, but I wanted something else to add a different line that threads through the whole song. I tried out a solo violin (Embertone’s Joshua Bell violin) but it never quite fit; too passionate, like French cafe gypsy jazz. I didn’t want to use a guitar, and though a trumpet almost worked, it was bloody difficult to get it to sound bluesy. Then I remembered that I’d picked up Embertone’s Honkytonk Harmonica in a sale, and tried that out. Immediately it sounded right; this is a bluesy kinda song, and a harmonica is perfect. The first takes were more overblown/overdriven (it is a honkytonk harmonica, after all), but I chose to tone it down to blend better with the voice. I listened to a whole bunch of Stevie Wonder’s harmonica solos to get my head into the right space. Robert Plant also played a mean harmonica for Led Zeppelin, but that was the wrong style.
If you’ve never played a really expressive virtual instrument like this, here’s how it works.
My right hand plays the notes, on a piano-style keyboard.
My left hand thumb moves a modulation wheel which controls the level of vibrato added to the note.
My left hand’s other fingers control a pitch bend wheel, that lets me “bend” the note for those lovely slides up that lead back into the verses (and on the final note).
My left foot is on an expression pedal that controls the volume of the notes.
That’s pretty complex and of course I can’t play it well enough to get it completely right. But one of the best things about the way that modern virtual instruments work is that the computer doesn’t record the sound of the instrument. Instead, it records which notes I play, how hard I play them, and how and when I move the controls, and once all that’s recorded, I can edit any of it; the timing, the notes and all the different controls. And that’s what I did; edit to get the exact performance I wanted, which is a whole lot better than I first played it.
That Piano Solo
I’ve wanted to do a kinda jazzy3 piano solo for a while, and this song is slow enough4 that I thought I could pull it off, with enough practice. It’s played on the New York Steinway Blues piano of Modartt’s Pianoteq 8. This was mostly done in one take5, with a couple of edits, and I like it. It’s not perfect, but then neither is the voice, or the guitar, or the bass. There are still little mistakes in there, but that’s part of the whole sound-like-a-band rule that I try to follow. Human musicians make mistakes, and I am extremely human.
I think there a a few different ways to come up with solos:
Spontaneously improvise, borrowing from all the stuff you’ve ever played to produce a work of genius in the moment. Yeah, I can’t do that.
Build on a melody or theme from elsewhere in the song. I do that quite a lot, because I like music that references itself and adds variation.
Build on the chords that go under the solo. This is a simple but really effective approach, and some of the greatest blues players use it consistently. I am not a great blues player at all, but that’s what I did in this solo.
The chords are broken down and arpeggiated and messed around. For example, over a D6/9 chord (D E and B) I’m playing D (D F# A) alternating with D6/9, and over the Em I’m adding the D# and F# from B7.
Those Strings
The great thing about string sections is how they fill out the whole listening space6 with beautiful harmony.
The bad thing about string sections is how they can easily swamp all the other instruments by filling the whole listening space with beautiful harmony.
I made a classic mistake with this string part: I wrote it before I’d fully worked out the rest of the arrangement, and then had to spend a bunch of time re-working it to get it to stay out of the way of the other instruments. There’s a lot going on in it, and it’s rather beautiful on its own, but you don’t get to hear very much of that because of how pared-down it is.
What I should have done is to carefully arrange the string parts from the start; when choosing the notes and octaves for the strings to play, avoid the notes that are played by the piano or sung by the voice. A good string arrangement leaves space for the more important instruments. Here the strings’ job is to provide a background for everything else, playing way up high above everyone else and down around the piano left-hand part, leaving room for the piano right-hand.
In the end the mix used quite a lot of “dynamic equalization”7, which is a way of turning down the exact frequencies of the strings that would otherwise get in the way of the vocals, harmonica or piano. The folks who mixed the classic records of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s didn’t have tools like this, and I’m frankly in awe of how they managed to get the results that they did.
The strings in this song are from Spitfire Audio’s Intimate Strings, which is a good example of a one-trick pony. If you want long, beautiful, gently swelling sustained string notes anywhere on the keyboard, this is a great instrument. If you want any other kind of long note, not so much. The strings are echoing the harmonica line in several places, but because the notes are slow and languorous and beautiful, you’ll probably never notice it. But hey, for adding that long high beautiful single B that suspends over the second verse and beyond, nothing better.
The Voice
Good old Solaria doing her virtual, synthesized thing. Synthesizer V (the voice engine that generates Solaria’s voice) added a really powerful new trick recently; you can blend and change “voice modes” during notes. Voice modes are different ways to sing a note. For example, Solaria can sing softly, powerfully, with passion or in a clear voice. By changing voice mode while a note is being sung, I can have the singer start the note softly and then add more power or depth or passion as the note continues. Or have a succession of notes sung with different force. Every phrase in this song has some of that voice blending, all added by hand.
I also did a lot of careful tweaking of the pitch of certain notes. Virtual singers sing beautifully on-key, but blues scales include notes that are not technically in tune. The third of a blues melody is slightly flat, and often the seventh and, especially in this song, the sixth. That means slightly flattening those notes, but the amount of flattening changes while the note is sung; again, all done by hand.
The other major change in building the vocal part is that I played the vocal melody on a guitar, not the piano. The guitar is a much more voice-like instrument; you can bend notes and have much more control over how notes evolve as they sound. The not-quite-on-the-beat timing of those vocal phrases (as in it’s trying to tell me / that one and one adds up to two) is all from the original guitar recordings. Once I had the guitar, I used a neat feature of Logic Pro8 to convert the guitar sound into MIDI notes that I could then use as the basis of the voice performance. I used some of the bending of the guitar notes as a reference when I was carefully tweaking the pitch of the sung notes.
This is one song that I can claim to have sung, since I found the best way to get the timing of the vocals right was to sing it to myself as I played it.
Now, I don’t claim that this vocal is an especially great blues performance; I’ve yet to hear one from any virtual singer9. And Solaria’s voice is based on Emma Rowley, who is a wonderful vocalist, but not one you’d pick as a blues legend. But that said, I think this is pretty damn good. And while this may be a virtual voice, I put every note and nuance in there by hand, and last time I checked I’m entirely human, not AI.
The Supporting Cast
The guitar is my beloved Epiphone Dot, through a Line 6 Helix LT guitar processor. It’s mostly playing lovely sparse stabbed chords in time with the snare. Someone once described the job of rhythm guitar as “make it sound like the drums are playing chords”, and that definitely holds here. The guitar is restrained, though it occasionally breaks free a bit, and I like that tension.
The bass is my Squier Mini-P short-scale bass guitar, again through the Line 6 Helix LT processor. The bassline evolves through the song; mostly the chord root notes to start, then adding passing fifths in the second verse, then seconds and thirds under the harmonica solo and in the last verse.
The drums are IK Multimedia’s MODO Drum. These seem to get better every time I use them; the most tunable and flexible virtual drum kit that I’ve found. I let Logic Pro’s Drummer generate me a basic 6/8 beat to start with, and then hand-edited almost every part of it to get the final performance. I would love to be able to finger-play drums like the incredibly talented Andre Louis, but I don’t have a spare lifetime to practice.
Harmony
This is, essentially, a blues in E minor and 6/8 time. The chord progression is based on that old musicans’ favourite, a line cliche. That’s when the bassline moves down by a half-step on every chord, and it’s called a cliche because, well, it’s pretty common. You’ll hear it in Feeling Good (any version; here’s Nina Simone’s classic on Spotify and YouTube - wait until the brass comes in to hear the descending line). Or the start of Stairway To Heaven (Spotify, YouTube). Or the verse chords of The Beatles’ Something (Spotify, YouTube).
When you have a cliche, the thing to try and do is to subvert it a little. With a bassline starting on E, the obvious chords are Em, B/D# D, A/C#, C, B7 and back to Em.
Here the chords are Em, D#+ (with a #9 the first time it’s played), D6/9 and D6, A/C# and A. Then on the second pass it’s Em, D#+, D6/9 and D6, C#7, CM7 and finally we arrive at B7(b9). To be pedantic (because I know some real professional musicians read this stuff), yes, D#+ is also a B+, which is a perfectly good dominant alternative.
The chords in the chorus are Em, A, Am and B7(b9). I’ll take any chance I can to shift between a major and a minor; it’s such a beautiful saddening of the chord.
The piano solo uses the same chords as the verse, but the harmonica solo uses a simpler Em, B/D#, D, A/C# because the more complex chords would just get lost in the whole arrangement. It ends with a couple of repeats of CM7 and B7(b9) because (a) I’m a sucker for a flat-6th major seventh chord10 and (b) these are the two chords that appear again close to the end of the song, and I like the anticipation.
In the bridge (under and the time is the tick of my heart) the chords change to Am G D, Am G F A#M7 and up to reach B7(b9), the dominant that leads it all back to Em and the start of the solo.
And to be complete… the final chord isn’t just an Em, it’s an Em11 played as D over E, because it sounds unresolved and that’s how I wanted the whole thing to end.
…And Melody
I spent a lot of writing time playing around with the melodies in this song. Mostly on the piano, which is the best possible instrument for just listening (preferably with closed eyes and a pained, how-I-suffer-for-my-art expression on the face) to how notes sound together. But switching instruments can also be a great way to spark new ideas. The voice melodies generally come from the piano, and the harmonica lines were mostly written on a guitar.
In the verse, the voice follows a simple three-phrase pattern, where each phrase is a variation:
It’s four in the morning starts with a leap up, a couple of steps down and a couple of steps back up. It ends on a B, which is the fifth of the Em chord and also fits over the D#+ or B+ that comes next, so it “bridges” between the first two chords.
the dark of December is the same, but with a step down at the end. It ends on G, which is the third of D#+ and the sharpened fifth of B+, and a suspended fourth of the D6/9 that comes next. Bridging chords again, but with a more unsettled sound, which fits the progression.
and it’s empty in the bar starts with the same leap but steps down and then down again to C#, the third of the A/C# and A chords that end the first part of the verse. That C# feels unexpected to me; a progression like this might often end on B (the always-important fifth), but this time it ends on A, the fourth, which I think feels less “settled”, and I think the C# melody note helps emphasis that. It also works for that gorgeously sexy C#7 that appears the second time through the progression.
Once that pattern’s established, the rest of the vocals follow it. More or less. With variations.
It took me years to learn that the final note of a phrase is as important as the first note, and to figure out how to pick out good notes to be held while the chords change under them.
The harmonica line that starts the song is referenced, as a variation, when it returns in the chorus (immediately after the line pour me another one). It ends with that really nice little climbing phrase over B7(b9) that comes at the end of the intro and each chorus and leads back into the verse. I was playing with arpeggiating the B7(b9) chord (B C D# F# A and so on) and found it a bit meh. But when you change the order of the notes to B D# C F# D# C… that’s much more interesting. Plus it ends with slow steps down through B A G to that lovely harmonica half-step slide up from D# to E. That D# is a wonderfully tense major seventh under an E minor chord, and I think it contributes a lot to the overall harmonic “mood” of the song. A minor-major-seventh chord like that is not generally a contented or happy sound, and when it settles back to Em I think it helps the whole thing resolve for a moment of relief before the bass starts descending again.
The last bit of painfully deliberate melodic construction comes in the middle eight.
The voice sings and the time is the tick of my heart landing on G as the chord changes from Am to G, and the harmonica answers with a phrase that uses the same notes as the voice but over a different chord, ending on A, the fifth of the D chord that comes next.
The voice sings and the silence is falling like snow. The melody is the same pattern as the first line, but tweaked to end on A as the chords come back to Am. And then the harmonica echoes its previous line, but with a variation.
In other words, the two melodies reflect each other, and the second phrase of each melody reflects the first phrase.
There’s another small trick used here in the middle eight. It’s very common in Western pop music to use chords in groups of four. Here there’s a group of three that repeat: Am G D Am G. I very much like the way that this progression “shifts” underneath the song; it means that the first and second phrases of each melody are over a different pair of chords, which changes how the same notes sound.
At the end of the middle eight, the voice sings and the words of the song seem to say, over G and then a nicely unexpected F. The last note (say) is an F, and as the chord changes to A#M7 the F stays (hey); bridging again. Then the voice sings let it go on C and A. These are the ninth and major seventh of that A#M7, which are not notes that feel “complete” and I wanted that unsettled, incomplete feeling at that point. The middle eight vocal line ends on B as the chord moves to B7(b9) and we’re back at the start of the verse (in this case, the piano solo).
Artwork
The picture in the middle is a licensed image from Adobe Stock. I was searching for abstract jazz and it stood out to me. It’s AI-generated to some extent (zooming in shows the usual giveaways) but the human author “August” has a good eye for colour and composition. I like the idea of rewarding someone who’s producing interesting stuff using digital tools, because that’s essentially what I do with music (though I personally have zero interest in having AI do any of the actual creative work for me).
I like changing up the style of the artwork every few releases, and something about the “art gallery” style appeals to me. The next release will look pretty similar, to emphasise the connection between the two songs.
From Good Friends, on the Dog Eat Dog album. Her not-a-hippy-anymore album.
Bedroom producer note: I use iZotope’s Ozone to do the mastering, because it can get to a good starting point very fast. Also, after a year of using it, I now have a dim grasp of what all the modules are doing, and feel okay about turning them off if I want to.
I think you could call this jazz-influenced as opposed to actual jazz.
Meaning that I can play with feeling, or I can play fast, but generally not both at once.
Not, of course, the first take. Or the second. Damn thing took me a week to figure out and play well enough.
The technical term I’m avoiding here is the whole frequency range.
Geeky details for other bedroom producers; this track uses TBProAudio’s DSEQ3 plugin a lot. It’s along the lines of the hugely popular Trackspacer, but much more powerful and flexible.
Flex-pitch allows you to export the detected notes to a MIDI track. It’s like a guitar-to-MIDI converter, but not in real time.
This isn’t quite true; for example, there are Adele covers on YouTube that use a virtual singer and sound pretty damn good. But, those were made by using software to trace every note that Adele sang, and how she sang it. That’s fine, but it’s copying, not writing.
There are major-seventh flat-sixth chords in The Sky Beneath My Feet and A Zero For A Heart and Some Say Love… I tell myself that I can stop using them any time I want, you know. I really can.