I finally got a couple of songs to a mostly finished state though I have to tweak the vocal volumes on one of the songs.
You Stir My Soul
Great God
For the past week, I’ve been ever so tickled by the ease of recording that GarageBand provides. But no matter how easy the recording process has become, it’s still a very tedious process. In fact, the easy part is actually laying down the tracks. What takes the longest time is the post-production stuff that gets my songs to a finished state. I probably spend at least 4 to 5 times more time tweaking what I’ve recorded than actually recording.
But that’s the beauty of music production. The artistry is not just in the recording or the song. There’s also an incredible amount of artistry in how your sound is ultimately presented to your audience. The original recording is much like a line drawing or a pencil sketch on a canvas. That forms the basis of the picture. Then like using paints, you apply color and shading to the raw sketch to make it come to life, resplendent with colors that give the picture a “mood” of sorts. A touch of reverb here, some delay there, perhaps some pitch shifting, or time correction. It’s all part of the “painting” process.
So why all this focus on recording in this series? Well, I haven’t mentioned it distinctly, but I’m working on creating an album of the religious music I’ve written for the Catholic Mass. The album is entitled “You Stir My Soul.” You can listen to the title track here. Note that this is not in a finished state. I have to bring down the lead vocal volume a touch because it totally steps on the instrumentation. I put this out on my band’s website so my cohort Dave could see what I did with the harmony, and how I slightly restructured the song from its original form. I also laid down a groovin’ song called “Great God” that is mostly finished, though I have to re-record the guitar solo because of some bad string plucks on my part. 🙂
To tell the truth, I’ve been working on this album project for a couple of years. My wife has been bugging me to get my music out, and I’ve just given her the excuse that I’m so busy that it’s hard to find the time to record. But that’s not really the truth. The real truth is that I purchased much more advanced equipment than I actually needed to create spec recordings. I mean, it was total overkill, and on top of that, I’ve spent tons of time just learning how to operate the softaware! Don’t get me wrong: I love ProTools, but it’s so much more software than I need right now. For specs, you want to get your songs to a good enough state so that when you submit them to a music publisher, they have a good idea of what you’re after in your music. And as I’m doing this myself, ease-of-use and a short time-to-production are absolutely key!
This is where GarageBand is literally a God-send. Most of the hard sound engineering stuff like EQ and mixdown is either done automagically, or is incredibly easy to tweak. It has allowed me to concentrate on producing my music rather than spending inordinate amounts of time learning how to use the recording software. The net result is that where it used to take me a couple of weeks to get a song close to a finished state, it now takes a couple of days; or in the case of You Stir My Soul, I produced the mostly-finished recording in a matter of hours! I can finally see the end of the tunnel to create my spec recordings and get my demo album out!
I used to scoff at GarageBand as not being “real” recording software. But the the sheer quality of the recordings it produces rivals any recording software I’ve used in the past. It may not be as full-featured as “Pro” recording packages, but for what it offers and what it can produced, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better solution for home recording.
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