Songs from the Trailer Park

Posted a song today, "Julve Sings Again".

The title comes from a friend rebuilding an antique guitar. I forget the exact name of the model, but "Julve" is obviously part of it.

Jan Antonie Baars and I were doing our usual thing, casually writing music together long distance. He is in the Netherlands, I was in Thailand at the time. For a couple months we had been sending chord and song structure ideas back and forth. Suddenly, from my perspective, he finished working on this guitar and immediately had a buyer. In a rush of two days he laid down a strumming/slapping track and overlaid that with a solo line, all from that antique guitar and based on our agreed on song structure. Then he sent it to me, apologizing that the current state of the track cannot be changed because he is no longer in possession of the guitar.

I added my own baseline to his acoustic guitar track, and that is what you have before you now. It was difficult to mix because frequently the strumming is louder than the lead playing, and it is all baked into one track impossible to separate. I had to go through some mixing gymnastics firstly to get rid of some of the noise in the recording and secondly to try and EQ the thing so the lead melody could be heard as much and as often as possible. The very end of the piece had no such problems because there is no loud strumming and slapping drowning out the lead. I also chose that point to lay off with the bass and let the guitar sing a cappella.

So this is the best I could salvage out of a ten-year-old project using newer-to-me mixing techniques. I did not want to pare down the midrange so much but it was the only way to get some of the lead to come through in places. The overlap in frequencies made this a delicate and daunting task. I did my best.

For those not here on my site, the piece can be heard here:

https://www.numberonemusic.com/songsfromthetrailerpark

Just touching base here. I’m working hard completely reworking an old song I did about ten years ago. I was going to remaster it and post it, but I found it too embarrassing to show publicly. All the instrumentation needs to be completely rethought and redone. Not sure how long this is going to take, but it is not at all like I am going to start writing a song. I’m just replacing instruments and modifying their parts. I hate deadlines, but I’ll wild guess by the end of this month with no promises.

I recently completed a long mixing and mastering class. Unfortunately that does not magically enable me to produce radio-ready commercial quality music. I need to still work along those lines for a long time if I ever do achieve that level of expertise. It's like you learned the alphabet and were given a dictionary, now go write a best-selling novel!

I was going through an online class from Berklee College of Music and a little assignment was to define yourself as an artist. The formula is:

 Artist 1 + Artist 2, with a healthy dose of Artist 3. 

I thought that was rather easy.

Emerson Lake and Palmer + Black Sabbath, with a healthy dose of Chopin.

That requires a little explanation because I don’t sound like any of those three. From ELP I like the technical precision and the sparse orchestration — three people. From Sabbath I like their bass player in particular and how on many songs he is adding an extra busy bottom melody making their music polyphonic, and I like the heavy metal aspect. With Chopin we get the classical influence with a sense of drama and great joy, big emotions whether tender or explosive, playful or angry, and his chord construction is something I study with great interest.

So, I'm working hard on something I hope will turn out to be very special. Expect my production skills reflected in the quality of the finished project to improve with each song posted, and I HOPE to have something out by August 1, 2017.

Jim Gramze
(Songs from the Trailer Park)

Just posted the song "Leave Me". It was written, guitared, and sung by Jan Antonie Baars, my old music writing partner back in 2009. I added piano and a low string sound to provide a sense of warmth and foreboding. I also wanted to add other parts such as a ticking clock, like on an old fashioned time bomb, but Jan didn't like the idea.

The logistics of our partnership was interesting because I was living in Thailand at the time, and Jan was living in the Netherlands. We became friends through MySpace. What we would do was e-mail each other with musical ideas and WAV files. We had to agree on a tempo so that when one of us would send the other a track it would already be perfectly in time with the project we were putting together. This is one such song. There will be others as I dredge them up.

Just a quick note to let you know I just posted two songs. I've had them up in the past and had to take them down to make room other things. Since upgrading my membership there's now room for up to 30 songs so I don't much have to worry about that any more. I did remaster them so they sound a lot better.

Both versions of "Rounded Brainary" are in an old-fashioned classical style, digging way back into my technical music roots. I do this sort of thing once in a while.

Just posted "Black Cloud". I'm guessing I made this 10 years ago. I dusted it off and did my best to "master" the finished project. I have a number of older things of various styles that I will be adding as time goes by.

Hi,

I'm currently locked into a mess that has me tearing things down in order to rebuild them better. My little studio was anything but ideal so I put in room-correcting sound panels that are at the same time decorative. My DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) which I create the music on starting becoming unreliable so I changed to a different one (from Apple's Logic Pro to Steinberg's Cubase Pro 9) and have been entrenched in a steep learning curve. New equipment and new tools all around, really, like one of those home fixer-upper TV shows where they gut the house and make it something amazing — that's what I've been doing. Along with taking classes on how to do all things better the actual music production process has been at a standstill while I recreate the entire workflow from scratch. The fantastic news is that I've learned how to master, which is taking what seems like a finished song and then bringing it up to recording studio standards. To completely risk losing you, I learned how to make a 10-band limiter which takes a piece of music which seems fine and brings everything into sharp clarity, like an out of focus image being adjusted by turning the lens until everything has compelling clear definition.

So I'm basically done tearing down and rebuilding things, and learning is a never-ending process. I have a new song idea which I am setting up in my new DAW and it will take a little while to bring it to fruition. Roughly, think Jim Morrison of the Doors fronting Black Sabbath, but with my sensibility behind it. It's about accepting the inevitability of being born, living, and then ultimately dying. Heavy stuff. The metaphor is of leaves falling off the (family) tree. It's hard to stick with the metaphor! I'll try to attach one or more pics onto this message of my studio from four different perspectives, focusing mainly on the decorative absorbing panels and bass traps. Let's see if I can attach pictures to this.

Hi all,

This feels weird, sending out a subscriber announcement. Just a heads up that I removed a couple songs and replaced them with two others. Both are rather moody, "Dark Cloud" being a trumpet thing with piano, and "Serenade in D Minor" is a piano solo I made for my wife (she told me to make her a song because I never had, and this is what came out).

I'm not very prolific, making between one and four songs each year. I'm a retired musician and try to put quality over quantity . . . AND I'M RETIRED! My next song is a weird one in concept, but I'll wait for it to be finished before I yammer on about it. Kinda creepy, really.

Until then,

Jim Gramze