From outside the box

For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of making my own record album. I guess now days it's called making a cd. I've sat in on several recordings over the years, mostly with bands that I played with at the time, but I haven't recorded much of my own stuff. Now that I'm pushing sixty, I figure it's about time.

About two years ago, when I decided that I wanted to do this project, I started the long and expensive task of putting together a recording studio. Understand that a recording studio these days can be as simple as a Mac, a mixer, and a microphone and can be assembled anywhere in your house that you have room for a computer. But since my project was going to be a solo effort, I knew I needed to accumulate more instruments as well.

So two years later and armed with several guitars, a keyboard, a Mac quad, and several new songs, I'm just about ready to begin the long tedious task of laying out tracks. My plan is to play all of the instruments (I may use a drummer) and do all the vocals. I know this will not sound as good as using other musicians, but I am pretty much burned out on dealing with other musicians. Thirty five years of playing on rock and roll bands can do that to you. Besides, it's a project, not anything I would ever expect to market or make any money on.

If you've never written and recorded a song by yourself, I can tell you that it's a challenge. I've done it a couple of times years ago. You start by laying out the rhythm guitar (and drums if your using them). Then you add your lead vocal. Next I put what I have recorded on a cd and play it whenever I am driving. As I'm listening to it, I practice sing harmony in the spots where I want harmony. When I have the harmonies down, I record them. Then as I drive around and listen to those raw tracks, I imagine what the bass lines should sound like. I do the same for the keyboards and other guitar parts. As you layer on the instruments, the song starts to take shape, or as I like to say, it comes into focus.

To me, this process is the ultimate in creativity because your options of what to play and how to play it are literally unlimited. I find that if you listen carefully to the harmonics and overtones of what is recorded, the song will usually present to you what should be recorded next, the proper notes and such. The idea is that when the listener hears the song, they cannot imagine anything in the song sounding any different than it sounds. The challenge is to keep it simple and clean. Simple is not too much of a problem for me because of my limited abilities as a musician. I've just got to be careful not to overcrowd the songs with too many guitars and such.

Others have asked me what I would do with a cd if I record one. I really don't know. To tell you the truth, my fantasy is that one day about 50 years from now, one of my offspring would be rummaging thru some old stuff in their garage and find this cd. They would play it and once they figured out who it was, they would say, "Wow, that was my great grandpa? He wasn't half bad!"