The Work Diary

This song almost got vetoed or at least significantly reworked, but its already a day late and I need to upload.

I was going to add bass guitar to this one but ended up taking it out because it didn't really add anything to the song.  I was also going to add keyboard and harmony, but for the same reason they were axed.

Music inspired by recently found band Hurray for the Riff Raff.

Lyrics were inspired by Schubert's Gretchen Am Spinnrade which were written by Johann Von Goethe.  Found here: http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/romanticperiod/qt/gretchenlyrics.htm

Pro Tips

 - My script writing teacher in Melbourne told me "If it doesn't help propel the story forward then get it out."  This can also be applied to music.

 - According to the Allen Ginsberg Movie "Howl", Allen says the goal is to speak to your 'muse' the same way as you speak to your close friends in order to achieve true frankness.

Ishida

I might be wrong, but I believe the vibrato of an actual Hammond organ is made by a horn inside of an accompanying Leslie speaker spinning at a different frequency than a rotating chamber that bounces around / amplifies the sound...like a guitar body.  You can use the keyboard's turnwheel to activate or deactivate this effect.

I've wanted to learn how to play accompanying organ with the volume pedal for a long time, so I figured instead of learning another song I'd just make up my own - finally.  I thought writing my own song would be this big occasion, but really I just had to learn an organ song within a week:

 - guitar - 30 seconds
 - melody - 30 mins
 - harmony / counter melody - 1 hour
 - lyrics - 2 days?
 - organ - 5 days

Lyrics were annoying because its just hard to decide on the what words to use only to later discover that the natural stresses of the syllables wont quite gel with the stresses of the melody you're fooling around with OR you begin changing the melodic idea to accommodate the foreign sounding words - then I get stuck going back and forth forever.  I mean eventually you can get away with mumbling a word here and there or just saying fuck it they're gonna go where I want them to go, but I just didn't want to do that - I wanted some kind of natural gellingness.  Then I kinda realized how certain cliche phrases and rhymes just sit easy in the mouth - and thats what actually propelled the work forward because I knew I had serious heavy lifting to do w/ the keyboard part.  I can kinda see how outsourcing lyrics to someone else would be useful because its just freaking hard to argue with yourself. 


Take aways
 - Mixing Pro tip - recording with effects live is way more fun than adding reverb and stuff afterwards.  Messing with EQ while you're recording and seeing how the compressor works live are good lessons.  You also don't need to sing as loud to get a good capture - I recommend it. 

  Songwriting Pro tip - Its hard to reinvent 5 wheels at once, so just choose one thing to accomplish and don't feel bad about leveraging cliche / familiar ideas at first

 - The videos were loading too slowly, so I exported at very low quality in order to avoid buffering hell online

 - Lyricism is an entire field of its own - being sensitive to all the syllables and rhymes and fricatives and even just the attention grabbing nature of uncommon words really demands significant mindshare...in my opinion.

Ishida