Documentation on writing and recording the song “Ten String Lyre (Tidal Wave)”

 

For my second project I wanted to again try something that I had extremely minimal experience with, such as writing, recording, and mixing a song. While I had written songs and recorded them very crudely on either tapes or garage band, I hadn’t played with panning, volume shifting, and mixing well at least. Before I moved to Austin from Chicago I was in a band with two of my best friends, called Ten String Lyre. We played a good amount of shows, and even on the ESPN 1000 once, and recorded a five-song EP. Although had a part in the recording process, the actual engineering was completely out of my ignorant hands. We broke up on frustrated terms, not bad ones, but not good ones either. Our breaking up was the impetus for me to move to Austin and enroll in graduate school. In class the subject of death was talked about in looser terms as a transition, or a transitory experience, where once taken place nothing after will ever be the same. This can involve many media, such as friendship, stages in life, so on and so forth, so I looked at my band. This represented for me, a change in lifestyle, a change in geography, a change in goals, a complete change in my life’s direction. And no matter what, the band Ten String Lyre would never be the same even if we ever got back together. This was a very difficult transition for me. I loved practicing all the time with my friends who played and came to listen. I loved playing live. I loved the lifestyle. I didn’t love the paycheck, but I loved not loving the paycheck. Going from that to “I’m a grad-student in Texas” wasn’t easy, to say the least.

This all being said, I decided to write a song for the death of the band and that lifestyle. “Tidal Wave” represented how the transition felt to me. Since a lot of our songs were in E-major, I decided to write it in E-minor. For the most part the song came pretty naturally and incorporated at time ideas I had in my back pocket. I wanted a long building intro and a very dynamic rhythmic signature, culminating in a final Tidal Wave climax to not only show the ups and downs of the band, but also the final crash wiping away clean of everything that had been. I also wanted to incorporate many of the techniques I had learned from being in the band, and interspersed them throughout the body and lead of the song. Due to the songs dynamic rhythm, it was, at least for me, unrealistic to find drum samples and loops that would fit in garage band. Also, despite five and a half hours of my best efforts, I was forced to give up on the bass track. I used a $28.99 Logitech digital mic from Best Buy for the recording. While the mic is awesome for digitally canceling background noise from the source sound, its range was not broad enough for the bass. After trying multiple amp to mic distances, as well as guitar and amp settings, and rerecording the bass tracks a million times, I could not get a recording powerful enough to have a presence in the mix without peaking and distorting the sound. This was a disappointment, but as the acoustic quality of the guitar tracks stand, I feel it suffices. And if Dennis Wellman reads this, he will listen to it over and over times five jiggawatts!