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Recording the tubular bells voice using my Oxygen
MIDI keyboard.
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Working out the bass line.
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Writing down the bass notes.
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Chord notes for reference for the bass line.
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Composing/rehearsing the lead vocal.
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Screen capture from the
YouTube page
for the long version's music video.
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Still frame from the DV movie footage for the long
version's music video.
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Still frame from the DV movie footage for the long
version's music video.
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Still frame from the DV movie footage for the long
version's music video. This one's from a shot
not used in the
final cut.
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Still frame from the DV movie footage for the long
version's music video.
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This song started as a complete reinvention of the lyrics to
"Jingle Bells," and then was put to chords based on, but
greatly altered from, the "Jingle Bells" chords. The initial
plan was to have this recorded,
mixed &
mastered,
and set to a
music video
to be posted on-line by
Christmas Day, 2024.
I did not finished recording it until quite a while after
Christmas.
In fact, it was July 2025 before I had all the tracks finished.
DECEMBER 20, 2024
I wrote my new lyrics then searched out the chords for
"Jingle Bells." If you really examine my set of lyrics
you may find the correlation between mine and the traditional lyrics.
And I did carry over one quite antiquated phrase.
DECEMBER 21, 2024
I altered the chords from the original, and not insignificantly. At
this point, the song evolved to far away from being anything that
could even be considered derivative of the original. It had become
a new song on its own merits.
DECEMBER 22, 2024
I programmed and recorded a base bass drum track, as a guide track,
with the drum hitting on each quarter-note beat. Though it was laid
as simply a guide track, I later decided to keep it in the finished
mix. Then
I worked out and laid down the chord progression of the whole song.
I used the
Legato III piano,
set on its
synth PAD
voice, which sounds like
polyphonic
synthesizer string voices.
DECEMBER 27, 2024
It took me a few days to get back to the "recording studio."
This day I worked out and recorded some percussion parts,
MIDI voices from
Logic Pro X played
with my
Oxygen 61 Keyboard:
a bell shaker, chimes, and tubular bells, all used judiciously. After
the recording session was over, I tweaked the lyrics a little bit.
DECEMBER 30, 2024
In this session I work out and recorded a progression of
dyad chords,
still on the Oxygen 61 Keyboard, using a
polyphonic
MIDI string instrument voice, again from Logic Pro X. The MIDI voice
I used is called "full strings." The part is half of a
four-note chord progression, with a second polyphonic string arrangement,
performed on another MIDI voice from Logic Pro, having a slightly
different sound, and filling out the chord. The semi-amateur/semi-professional
record producer in me already knew that the two parts would be placed
at different spots on the arch of the
stereo pan
in the final mix
to get a fuller sound to the recording.
DECEMBER 31, 2024
I recorded that second
dyad chords,
poly-string part in this session, using the "cellos"
polyphonic MIDI string instrument voice. In fact, I was lost in the
midst of this session when the New Year rang in.
JANUARY 1, 2025
The next evening, still using Logic Pro X MIDI voices, I started off
adding a double bass drum part, then I arranged and recorded the solo,
a cello. I actually recorded different sections of the part separately
and on two different channels on my
24-Track recorder.
The reason was that the actual solo, recorded on track 8, by itself,
uses the legato
setting for the cello voice to get a smoother movement between notes.
The other portion of this single cello part is flourishes during bridge
sections of the music and is set to
"staccato":
short notes with no sustain, whatsoever. It was easier to record the
two portions of that cello separately, especially since one of the
staccato moments leads directly into the legato portion that is the
solo. If there's a way to automatically switch between the modes,
I didn't yet know it.
JANUARY 4, 2025
I put the bass line down in this session, using my
Epiphone Viola Bass
‐‐ (the poor man's version of the famous
Paul McCartney Höffner violin bass).
I'd pulled it out of its case the night before to start working the
part out. It'd been well over a year since I'd had any of my basses
in my hand, which is too long a period of time. As I wrote in a
blog post at the time,
"once again I [had] to reacquaint my hands and my mind with the
frets of my guitar." But, I still worked out a decent bass line.
I had to keep it a little simpler than it might have been, since my
skill set was more than a little rusty, yet it still is a bass line
that works.
JANUARY 6, 2025
On this day I began to really compose the lead-vocal melody line. I
didn't record, firstly because I was not yet completely satisfied
with the melody, and secondly, because I had the slightest bit of
congestion and a little bit of a sore throat, so some of the vocal
work would have been a little rough and quite a bit under par. I
also found some rhythmic problems with the lyrics, and got some other
better ideas for content, so the lyrics were tweaked a little during
this session.
JULY 5, 2025
After a half year I got back to this one, which only needed the vocals
added to wrap the recording phase. This day I fully developed the
lead vocal composition and recorded it. There wasn't much left to
finish composing, and what I worked more on was
vocal phrasing,
including some of the rhythm of the vocal and some note values. It
was 17 takes with many being false starts in one section or another,
and re-recording of said particular sections. I can't say that the
lead vocal matches the level of a
Paul McCartney, especially
in his prime, but it don't suck.
JULY 6, 2025
I knew I wanted a choral ensemble so I needed enough open tracks in
the song project on the 24-Track recorder to accommodate the ensemble.
The problem was that there were not enough open tracks; I wanted to
be sure I had enough open tracks to accomodate eight or more individual
voices. So, I bounced
all but the lead vocal to the last stereo track (#23/24), so that I
had eleven of the twelve mono tracks open. That also meant I had five
of the six stereo tracks open, (#13/14-#21/22), though I'd only be
able to use one mono track from each; but it gave me a total of sixteen
tracks free for the ensemble. All the tracks for what was already
recorded had been migrated into the song project in Logic Pro X for
the mixing stage; the bounce of them on the recorder to track 23/24
was simply to hear what was already recorded while recording these
choral vocals, though I did do a stereo mix for the bounce ‐‐
sort of an audition for the future true mix in Logic Pro.
JULY 7-14, 2025
I decided on an ensemble with eight voices, two on each harmonic part,
which is exactly what I did for
"Just One Shadow:"
two first tenor, second tenor, baritone, and bass voices. Over the
course of these days I worked out the parts and recorded the vocals.
Tuesday, Jul 8, I recorded both vocals for the second tenor part,
on tracks 1 & 2. And I did it all in much fewer takes than I
expected to: four takes for vocal #1, only three for #2. Both were
recorded in sections, with starts and stops at various points, with
each new start counting as a take. I did the baritone part next,
recording one vocal on Jul 9, the other the next night. Each of those
was four takes. On July 13 I double-tracked the first tenor part;
the next night I double-tracked the bass part.
JULY 16, 2025
With the eight-part ensemble recorded there were three mono and five
stereo tracks open (with the stereo ones ultimately amounting to five
mono tracks, since I can record on only one of the stereo channels
in a stereo track, then come back later and record on the other).
During the ensemble sessions I contemplated adding more vocal parts
during the ending of the song to get a more elaborate choral arrangement
there. On this night I improvised three separate
scat vocals
for the ending. They don't particularly have the vocal gymnastics
I'd hoped for but they work: I just ain't the singer I used to be.
AUGUST 27-SEPTEMBER 2, 2025
The weekend of July 18-20 I attended the annual new play festival,
FutureFest,
hosted by Dayton Playhouse,
then, the plan was to dive into
mixing and
mastering
"White Landscapes" starting on Monday, July 21. However,
I ended up doing almost nothing related to any of my
artistic/creative ventures for the next month because something
happened the day after the festival that stomped on my gut, and my
heart, and I was not in the mental or emotional space to do much of
anything but be by myself as much as possible. All I did in any of
my arts world were things obligatory, and I tried to do them as
stealthily as I could. The only exception was acting in the 2025
The Human Race Theatre Company
Playwright's Race for the annual
Downtown Dayton Art in the City
festival that happened the weekend after FutureFest. For the most
part, I did the gig because I didn't want to drop out at the last
minute.
But, a little over a month after the gut-punch situation, I returned
to the mixing and mastering of "White Landscapes." I mixed
and mastered both the longer album version and the shorter single
version. Of course, neither mixed/mastered versions were set in stone
as final and that bore out quickly with the single version.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2025
I did decide I didn't like the single
mix and
edit of the song, more so the edit, so I re-did it. The
remixing
was slight and simply to take the clunkiness out of some of the seams
of the edit borders; that meant dropping some instrumentation out
at those seam edges. Otherwise the
pan
stayed as it had been. I also slightly altered where the cuts were
made, and moved the fadeout at the end to start sooner. The new
single edit was 4:20, ten second shorter than the previous.
OCTOBER 27-NOVEMBER 4, 2025
I also normalized the single version of "White Landscapes"
to match up with the master volumes of the EP songs, despite that
it wasn't earmarked for the EP. While I was in there I bumped the
tempo of the single version by 15%, via
varispeed
‐‐ which dropped the play-length down from 4:18 to 3:36,
not including the silence at the end of the track.
This was during a light remastering of this version along with a
remix and remaster of the long version. But then, just as with
"Burning Bridge (2025 mix)" which was also remixed and
remastered at this same point, the master for both the long version
and the single version suffered from being too hot, with the subtle
beginnings of loudness distortion and
clipping.
Again, the push of the gain also made the recording a bit dirtier
than intended, in other words, there was too much overall distortion,
and it had an almost blanket muddy sound. I wanted all three recordings
to be cleaner.
I thought I'd need to rework the single along with the others in terms
of both remixing and remastering. Beyond a more conservative
use of gain, both for various stems
in the multi-track master projects and the final master recordings,
as well as tweaking a lot of EQ,
and probably some amount of stereo pan.
But first I had to replace speakers in my external monitor set for
my MacBook Pro,
because one blew. I ordered a new set of better speakers, a pair of
ADAM Audio D3V 3.5-inch Powered Studio Monitor Pair,
from Sweetwater. The D3Vs
arrived Oct 29 and proved to more than meet my expectations for sound
quality.
What I found using these new speakers, which have a more robust low-end
delivery, was that the masters for the singles, and to one extend or
the other, the four recordings for the EP sounded somewhat muddy
through them, based mostly on there being too much low end and too
little high end in the recordings. So, beyond the reworking of
gain on
"Burning Bridge (2025 mix)"
and the long version of the Winter season ballad, I needed to do far
more remixing
and remastering,
which I suspected was going to include a lot more gain reduction
and clearly a lot more adjustment to
EQ,
probably all the way down to the stems in the multi-track Logic Pro
projects.
I knew, by the way, that the low-end heaviness was only in these
recordings because I listened to other recordings as comparison from
my library of commercially released music and from stuff on
YouTube, and it all sounded
just fine with a good balance of EQ. So the problem was the audio
engineer for this project; he's a bit more of a novice than he'd like,
you to know. But I suppose he's slo-o-o-o-wly learning.
Since it would release first, so was the priority, the single was
the first for the remixing/remastering overhaul. However, I found
I only had to remaster. I'd tried that first, to see if I could get
a satisfactory EQ sound without going back into the multi-track master
to tweak things, and in this case I could. There is a slight sibilance
in the lead vocal but I elected to live with it.
For a louder volume on the master recording, I rendered an intermediate
master recording then imported that into a new Logic Pro project simply
to render bumped-up volume. It was an experiment that worked and would
be employed with the tracks for the EP, and beyond that, in the future.
On November 4 I uploaded the single's
WAV file and cover
art to CD Baby, did all the processing
("paperwork" and payment), and scheduled the digital release
date for Friday, November 28, the day after
ThanksGiving.
The EP released two-and-a-half weeks later on December 15 as did the
music video for the long version of this song. I was able to shoot
the live footage I'd wanted because we finally got a good snow a
couple weeks earlier. In fact, it was a heavy snow that cause
the day job to
close for the day, and I was able to spend several hours, alone,
in Pearl's Fen
and the adjacent
Oakes Quarry Park,
both giving me exactly the snowscape I'd envisioned. I got great
footage and am terribly pleased with the music video for the long
version.
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