All right, thenewgreen, I'll bite.
So I have a life goal, which is to write, record, and post one song a month, every month, until I'm dead. I started doing this in 1993, and once the internet was invented, I started uploading the songs to a website (www.hardtaco.org) on the first day of every month.
I am an intermediate instrumentalist and singer; In fact, there are better musicians living in the houses next door to me on both sides, and in my own house (my wife.) But I feel like I have a pretty good sense of melody, and I absolutely love the power that rhyme has in songs. Good rhymes are one of the great joys of life. (Does somebody want to write a song about Prospero and Ross Perot? I'm giving you that one for free as a welcome gift.)
I'd say my favorite songs have utilized musicians who have different artisitc sensibilities than my own, and this seems like a good forum to find future collaborators.
So here's the song for September, 2020. It's sort of a country song, because why not?
http://www.hardtaco.org/media/mp3/Hard_Taco_Radio/Puff_Piece.mp3
"Puff Piece"
If you listen to rumor mill
To the flibbertigibbets
You could start to think my cheating ways
Are bereft of limits
My every fault laid bare
My every failure glaring
But there’s another side, I swear, I swear
To every tale you’re hearing
I need a puff piece
To help me bounce back
It’s been a rough week
I’ve caught enough flack, Honey
But a puff piece
Could turn my tough rep
Into a love fest
And bring me one step closer
To enough grease
To keep the gears turning
I feel my ears burning
From all the stuff these people say
I need a puff piece right away
Well there’s a plenitude of hearsay
But let me talk just a minute
And consider how your day-to-day
Is better off with me in it
I give you so much more
Of what you used to have less of
I only wish I had a P.R. firm
To make that sound a bit more impressive
I need a puff piece
I need a puff piece
To help me bounce back
It’s been a rough week
I’ve caught enough flack, Honey
But a puff piece
Could turn my tough rep
Into a love fest
And bring me one step closer
To enough grease
To keep the gears turning
I feel my ears burning
From all the stuff these people say
I need a puff piece right away
Feeling mad stressed
We need to address
All the bad press
Published to trick you
I need a tad less
Of all the bad bad press
I feel like Atlas
Carrying the weight of the big blue
It’s been a rough week
I’ve caught enough flack, Honey
But a puff piece
Could turn my tough rep
Into a love fest
And bring me one step closer
To enough grease
To keep the gears turning
I feel my ears burning
From all the stuff these people say
I’ve had enough grief, a wide array
So don’t rebuff me and hide away
Might I say, by the way
I need a puff piece right away
Jeff Kleiner - harmonica
Lauren London - vocals
Now somebody has to teach me how to use tags and such on hubs...
Your songwriting craft level is over 9,000. The diversity of genres is incredibly impressive. So far, my random selections start with this electro-country track you posted; then a Blink 182-like punk ballad, then I felt like I was in a movie soundtrack on another track, and now I've just heard a colonoscopy joke in a primarily piano-performed song. Who knows what's next? I'm gonna go find out after this comment. What DAW do you use? You could sell these. The fact that you don't is so damn cool. Awesome project, thanks for posting. :) Edit: You could just tag this #music, although someone has already "community tagged" this as #hubskioriginalmusicclub, which is probably the best possible tag. It's specific, has a legacy, but how is a new user to know such a thing? Pretty sure thenewgreen tagged it, but I would've done the same. Anyway, you get two tag slots that you can fill in your own post, as author, and then one community tag can be submitted by someone in the community. Someone else in the community can elect to change it, but usually that doesn't happen, no one's ever going out trolling in the tagging system. That I know of, at least. Welcome!!
Wow, thank you so much! Let's talk DAWs. I have used Logic for the last 10+ years, and I love it for almost everything. I wasn't always a Mac-ophile, but I'm in pretty deep now. The great: Logic is built for composing and editing. It's so much fun to audition different sound effects on a recorded track quickly and non-destructively. I love the flexible programmable percussion. that makes you feel like you actually were part of the creative process and didn't just steal a loop. The built-in patches for guitars are good enough that I haven't recorded an electric guitar through a real amp since, basically forever. The interface for recording multiple takes and taking the perfect clips from each one is simply divine. The pretty good: Logic has built in pitch correction, which I happily admit to using (fight me), but it is very time consuming to do it right. You can't just set the key and turn it on or off... you have to edit each note individually or it will either be wrong or add cracks and pops. Sometimes, it decides that two notes are actually a single note, and won't let you correct them individually. To record lead vocals on a song that I care about, I usually spend about 20 minutes recording 5-6 takes, 60 minutes picking the best take for each phrase (or word). and another 60 minutes playing with the pitch correction. If there are harmonies, multiply all that by the number of tracks. Sounds awful, I know, but it's very Zen. The not so good: Mastering. I used to have a PC, and used SONAR as the DAW, I had a hacked copy of a mastering program called T-Racks that was just glorious and idiot-proof. The built in mastering algorithms on Logic just don't sound right to me, and I'm not smart enough to figure out why. My solution? I've hired a guy named Michael on Fiverr.com to master my songs. It's $7/song, and he gets them back to me within 24 hours. I'm sure he doesn't actually listen to the songs. he probably just plugs everything into T-Racks! And that, thenewgreen, is my excuse for only doing one song a month. More would be simply too expensive.
DAWS! A well timed topic. I have been using protools since 2010 and I’m still using the same software and m-box. I’ve never upgraded. I’m about to build a detached music studio (translation: a 12x12 shed) and I will almost certainly upgrade my setup. They used Logic At the studio where we recorded The New Green’s first album and it seemed pretty intuitive. But I had always wanted pro tools. I had heard it was great from some musicians I respected. I don’t use any plugins with the exception of built in reverb and EQ. My plan is to get a new rig and take some lessons on how to use it. Even with the 2010 version, I’m only using 10% of its abilities. The person(s) that should weigh in are kleinbl00 (the guy helps design and test DAW’s and has a badass setup. He also mixes sound for film and television, and ghostoffuffle and flac because I think They are phenomenal musicians and have great ears for mixing imo. There are many here that should weigh in though.
As a bass player and guitar player, I want my DAW to give me a beat, a nice Roland Electric Piano chord on the 1, and just let me fucking play. My GarageBand + Scarlett setup works perfectly for that, if I want to plug my amp into the Scarlett. Otherwise I just use my iRig to plug directly into the iPad or MacBook, run Amplitube to get the sound I want, and pipe that into GarageBand. Super simple, and cheap.
Pro Tools is the least intuitive DAW ever made, except maybe Audition. I've only ever met one person who claimed to use Audition on purpose but he was deeply untrustworthy and also clearly didn't know what he was doing. There's zero reason to fixate on software. Use the stuff that works. I was deep into Logic until (A) I overran its feature set (B) Apple decided to make it GarageBand Lite. The expensive part will be the converters and the control surfaces anyway and if it's any good, it'll work with good converters and control surfaces. Logic ten years ago is a very different animal from Logic now. Logic now is all about "pull down this preset and we will overprocess the bejeesus out of whatever you're doing so that it'll sound mostly okay without having any ability to fuck it up but also the minute you try to tweak it the tiniest little bit the whole house of cards will collapse." Which, hey, if you can operate within that silo, do it. Grimes' debut album was in Garageband. Pro Tools ten years ago looks indistinguishable from Pro tools now except that PT has spent ten years improving (A) copy protection (B) internal processing (C) UI lol j/k the UI is every bit as garbage as it ever was my name is in the credits and I can't get MIDI to work half the time. The advantage Pro Tools has is that if you need sample-accurate sync, the ability to automate everything without dropping frames and a robust workflow that's interchangeable across multiple studios, there is literally no competitor. The good plugins are all AAX and the cheap, shitty plugins are VST/AU only. If you need Pro Tools? You know. If you think you need Pro Tools? You don't. Bear in mind that features are much easier to add than stability. Many of the worst products in the world are feature-rich. If you use 10% of a product's features but those 10% are 100% reliable, you invested wisely. If you use 100% of a product's features and they but out 10% of the time you got ripped off. The used machine tools sellers are chockablock with $250k CNC machines that were purchased and ran their entire lives making one part. I recommend Reaper a lot because it costs nothing and mostly works. I do not use Reaper because it's counter-intuitive for me. I almost never recommend Maschine because it's useful for like one thing and I'm not even good at that one thing but I use Maschine more than most stuff because it's really fucking fun. Whatever you're doing should be fun. Pro tools is not fun. But? That part where you get things sounding fucking perfect? That's pretty fun. Then you show it to the client and he was secretly harboring a desire for it to sound like Devo and he didn't tell you? So now everything sucks. Maschine is fun because it sounds awesome the whole way but who fucking cares. God is dead. Eventide released this last week. Who cares. I helped test it. It's pretty dope. It's not as dope as this which I also tested. I might have some named presets in there. Might not. Can't remember. Doesn't matter 'cuz it isn't free so no one will ever use it 'cuz you can't make chiptunes with it. You should probably download Reaper and PT First. You probably already have GarageBand. Use the one that's fun. I use Pro Tools and this shit hasn't been fun for years.
Great advice re tags. Also, you’re spot on Re his abilities. He’s very much a musical chameleon. In one moment he reminds me of Ben folds, the next They Might Be Giants and on and on. Talented fella!