Free Music Friday

I decided that if I am going to spend my time pretending that I know anything about music, then I should give everyone an example of music that I have created. As such, I have put a song, Toe the Line, up for download. It is free, so do with it what you will. Burn it, trade it, sell it if you can sucker anyone into buying it.

I recorded this song with the lead singer, Aaron, of my old band. We wrote, recorded and mixed the song in about three and a half hours.

The song started with the drum beat. When I first got the technology to record in my house, I sat down to start writing some music and realized that I knew nothing about the drums. I just sat at the keyboard and had no idea how to create a drum beat. So I went out and bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing Drums. Aaron and I were sitting around when I saw a drum beat in 12/8 in it. Aaron wrote the chord structure while I recorded the drum beat. Without getting into a long explanation of different time signatures and their purposes, I will say that we found that 12/8 allowed us to break each measure up differently to make the song more interesting. For example, we break the first measure up into 3 sections of 4 beats and the second measure into 2 sections of 6 beats. One interesting effect of writing drum tracks on a keyboard is that any drummer recreating what I have written here would have to have 3 arms, particularly in the chorus.

As for the rest, I play the bass and 2 guitars on the song. The first guitar is the high eight note you hear in the right channel. The second guitar is just distorted chords to beef up the chorus. With the bass line, I just tried to mimic the rhythm that Aaron came up with for his guitar part. Aaron plays one guitar and a short distorted piano lick during the chorus. We wrote the song so quickly that I can't actually remember the specific parts that I played, or even the chords to the song. Finally, don't pay much attention to the lyrics, Aaron just made them up as he went along so he could get the melody down.