Creating My Song

Once I put my mind to it the lyrics came easily enough. I was writing about personal experience and so I started by recounting memories and feelings and then began to try and make rhyming couplets. Once I was happy with my verses I began my chorus, I found this slightly harder as I felt a bit like I was repeating myself which was very frustrating.

My song is about my friend, who I lost in a car accident this past summer. It actually helped to just write about my feelings, which is what the first verse is about. My chorus is more based on my own grief but I think anyone who’s lost someone can relate to the pain you feel. My second verse is more personal as I wrote from memories that I shared with Rachel and our private jokes. When creating my melody I enlisted the help of my boyfriend, who is thankfully a musician and also my guitar tutor. I had written a ballad and so I knew the mood and the feel I wanted my song to have, I just didn't know the chords to create this. Together we tried out several chord progressions until I was happy we had one which fitted the lyrics. As it’s a ballad it’s written in ¾ timing, like a waltz and is reminiscent of Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ which has a similar feel. The song benefits from the slower pace and the lyrics are clearer. It also differs from the stereotypical 4/4 pop song timing.

We recorded the song using Cubase, which is professional recording software. For the vocals we used a Shure SM-57 microphone which is a dynamic microphone with a cardiod polar pattern – meaning the area around the microphone picks up sound.Bon Iver recorded the whole of his ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ album, featuring the song ‘Skinny Love’, on an SM-57. It’s a good microphone because it has a large frequency range, from bass up to vocals. The guitar and microphone were fed through an M-audio fast track 2.

When editing my song we duplicated the guitar tracks and equalised them differently to create a richer sound. We then panned the alternate tracks left and right. The vocals were gated and then equalised before we compressed them and finally ran them through a reverb effects channel. Gating them removes unwanted sounds at quieter parts of the track but still lets main audio through. Equalising removes unwanted frequencies, bringing clarity and tone to both the instruments and vocals. Compressing ensures the audio doesn’t peak and create digital distortion.

So hear it is, my first ever song!