MOCKING BIRD

Friends, 

 It all began with small tendrils of a verse melody repeating endlessly through my mind. Here is a snippet of the first source material.  { Mocking Bird Verse Snippet}.  That distinctive tone that stands out on top is a synth sound called "Swaggering Around". I liked it. It is a major anchor throughout the song.  It does not sound like much on its own but you have to use your imagination in this process.      

I played around with this pattern for several frustrating weeks (this is typical of my creation process...a lot of time in a sort of limbo land of uncertainty).   The creation process ALWAYS  starts slow and tentative.  It seems I sometimes forget everything I have learned and I get stuck in a land of "small" mind. Nothing sounds fresh. In this case my lack of progress forced me to move on to another song project altogether, at least for awhile.

I reluctantly (at first) returned to the song.   I decided to piece together two song ideas.  Here is the second change that inspired me to keep moving forward: {Mocking Bird Chorus Snippet}  This pattern found a home as my chorus or perhaps it's really a song bridge ..not sure.   You see…it is a chorus that never repeats.  It is only played once the entire song.   

The song came alive again for me when I found some free time to play with the melody and adding interesting voice harmonies.  I spent a huge amount of time just humming non sensical words at the rhythm.  The words and phrases then began to emerge as I repeated the patterns many, many times and felt grooves that sat with the music right (at least to my ears).      I had a lot of fun taking harmonies way higher than my comfort zone in terms of register.  This particular harmony really got my juices flowing {Mocking Bird Harmony}.  After this is when the song took off and when all engines start firing for me. This is when I go into a sort of hyperdrive of recording and laying down tracks.    The final stage is mixing and pre-mastering which is a process I wish I had more expertise at but that I love learning about and improving at.

As an aside; I received some free samples from an artist named Kenny Segal  (thank you Kenny) and decided to use them in this song but sparingly.  They are far down in the mix and not "musical" at all.  They give the the song extra sheen, body and character by adding strange percussive breathy sounds (whale-like) and other reverberish oddities.  Probably hard to hear but I know they are present in the mix ; ). 

The guitarish sounding patterns, echoes and synth buildups layer together to give the song a dream-like character that is hard for me to describe but I guess I don’t have to…just go and listen to the music. I will release it next week so stay tuned. 

Thanks and I hope all is well with you.

 

 Dave