Possibly the most complicated song I ever recorded was also one of my first songs. It took years of work, but before I could finish, I lost the files in a terrible accident. Heartbreaking as it was, this song shaped my entire life. Here is the story of how I created and lost 'The song with no name'.
The year was 2016, I was a sophomore in high school, watching 70s game shows and 80s tv dramas at night, downing copious amounts of ice cream, and celebrating the end of a long laborious basketball season.
Sometime during this period, I composed a new song that I was VERY excited about. The song featured interesting rhythms, a cool bass line, and one of my catchiest melodies of all time.
As a member of the drumline of my high school, I spent a lot of time playing groovy, fast-tempo cadences. The song was heavily influenced by percussion and drumline cadence ideas. Early on I decided that I wanted to create a song with lots of percussion.
I had yet to record one of my compositions, since I lacked the necessary equipment. I did have a program that allowed me to create sheet music. I didn't have my own computer, and it was hard to find the time to borrow my mom's. Thus, "The Song" was the first (and only) song I've ever completely composed on paper.
Naturally this took hours, I did much of the composition while sitting in church meetings, just using my brain to remember the notes from the piano. I finished writing the piano and drum portions on an airplane trip, which I'll always remember because my uncle was both confused and impressed that I was writing music without any reference.
After writing drum and piano parts, I put my hand-written copy of "The Song" to the test by entering it into the computer. After entering the notes, the computer was able to play back the parts that I created. I was (and still am) surprised to learn that I actually wrote the rhythms and notes mostly correctly!
Around the time I finished the sheet music, summer arrived! I was enlisted to help form a neighborhood marching band. In order to perform my parts, I had to ask my high school band teacher for permission to borrow the marching drums for a few days. I was shocked when he encouraged me to keep them for the entire summer.
Suddenly my ideas to create a percussion heavy song became more possible than I ever could have imagined! I had recently purchased all the microphones necessary to record my drum set, could it be possible to record marching drums as well?
Over the first two weeks of the summer, I recorded my first song ever"80s Tv Theme Song". I was able to record a drum set for the first time, and finish producing a song for the first time, something I'm still proud of today.
About a month into the summer I began recording my second song ever: "The Song With No Name". An almost laughably difficult challenge for a 16 year old kid in a basement with no experience. My first song consisted of digital synthesizers, a digital piano, glockenspiel, and drum set. (Although, I did add a marching snare drum later that summer.) I only needed microphones for the bells and the drums.
My second song included real piano, marching snare, a small marching bass drum, a large marching bass drum, analog synthesizers, digital piano, glockenspiel, ukulele, and drum set. Nearly every instrument was recorded with microphones. The majority of the instruments aren't commonly recorded, and no information for common recording practices existed on the internet.
"The Song With No Name" was nearly three times as long as my first song, with 4 or 5 different tempos. The computer program I used to record it didn't allow users to change the tempo in the middle of the song. This meant I had to create each section in a different project, and then attempt to make them fit together on one massive project once they were all completed.
I set about recording all of the drums for each section. Immediately I learned that playing the drums well enough to get them to fit together was going to be difficult. I couldn't hear the other parts of the song, I had to play to a metronome and I wasn't great at playing on time. This required a lot of practice, work, and editing until I could get a satisfactory sound.
Due to the fact that I had nearly no experience in the process, I tended to be a little too careful with things that certainly wouldn't have effected the final product. I spent hours choosing drum sticks that sounded perfectly 'in pitch', and wouldn't record until there was absolute silence in my basement. I often spent time shoving pillows under doors and putting towels on filing cabinets to avoid any sort of room noise.
Logically however, I'm not sure why I thought the vibration of a filing cabinet would show up in a recording when the mic was pointed at a very loud drum!
After several months of recording drums, I finally finished! However I still wasn't satisfied. I wanted it to sound as though there were several people playing each part, like a real drum line! At the time I was far to worried about how perfect the part was played, and so I determined that rather than recording more parts, I would carefully copy and paste each drum track multiple times in a separate project to create a whole section of drummers, each playing the same part.
By the time all the drum parts were edited, a new year of school began, and I spent the limited time I had editing parts further and recording Bass parts for each section on my digital keyboard.
I recorded and worked on "The Song With No Name" whenever my busy school and basketball schedule would allow me to. But time moves fast, and eventually it was summer again. I dedicated hours each day to recording and editing the remaining parts of the overcomplicated song.
Recording the piano was the biggest challenge. My family used a swamp cooler, and our baby grand was almost never open. Opening the piano for a week to record it meant that the inner wood of the piano was exposed to a level of humidity it hadn't ever seen. As you can probably imagine, my piano recordings didn't turn out very well, as after a few days of work the piano was playing in a completely different tuning than it originally was.
Despite all the struggles, I was able to complete all the sections by about October of 2017. I finally fit all the sections together into one massive project that would barely open on my mom's aging laptop. I had no idea how to mix the audio and my fear and (probably unhealthy) need for perfection prevented me from attempting to mix it. I decided to wait a few months to work on finishing the mix.
This was a very very bad idea.
I ended up working on a variety of other songs for a while and the behemoth of a song which I then decided to call "Summer" sat dormant for a while on my mom's hard drive. It wasn't until I moved to Cedar City for my first year of college that I learned the horrible truth...
My mom's hard drive had crashed, leaving all the data on her old laptop unreachable.
My two years of hard work can now be summarized in two poorly mixed .Mp3 files and a handful of grainy photos documenting the recording methods I used.
I hope to someday recover the data from the hard drive to finish what 16 year old me started. But for now, I take comfort in the fact that pushing myself to make something truly difficult has made recording other instruments much easier and more obtainable. I may have lost one of my coolest songs, but creating that song made me who I am today.
Comments