Anyway, here’s another rough rough rough recording of an original I’ve been working on. I’m considering stealing a page from google’s playbook and slapping everything with a Beta logo until it’s absolutely perfect. Hoping to have 2.0 for you in the coming weeks.
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~Y.H.P.
Now on to the good stuff.
The following is a clip of a melody I sang into my phone a few months back. I do this sort of thing a lot so I don’t forget melodic ideas when they come to me. For some reason, as soon as I stop singing a new melody, the whole thing immediately falls into radioactive decay in my brain. It’s literally gone in 5 minutes. Recording things on my phone gives me a vault to store this stuff in. DrOiD does.
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Pretty funny, no? So I let that one percolate for a while, figured out some backing chords, and came up with this rough track for a full song.
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I’m not generally in the habit of writing this sort of thing, but with this song, I was shooting for that Smokey-Robinson-&-The-Miracles sort of sound. You know, a bit quaint and sappy lyrically, but always classy. So far, I’d consider this a marginal success. Lyrically, I may have fallen to the wrong side of the tightrope, coming up a little less Smokey Robinson, and a little more ‘N’Sync.
Otherwise, I like the melody a lot. I’m envisioning an instrumental solo (guitar?) over the long minor chord progression toward the end of the tune, and I’d like to close out the whole shebang with a ‘November Rain’ style, sweet-stuff-gone-sour ending.
Let me know what you all think. I’m currently calling this one “Sentimental Love,” only because calling it “Paper Moon,” would be a bit too heavy handed an Ella Fitzgerald homage.
~Y.H.P.
~YHP
For now, I thought I’d request y’all’z feedback on some content ideas.
I’d like to create “segments,” sort of like what you’d see on late night talk television. For example, I’d like to do a “Before & After” segment, wherein you get to see the evolution of an original song. I’d record the song at different phases of development – maybe just a melody at first, then melody and piano backing, then song + band input, then final song – something like that.
I’d also like to do a ‘Lyrics Workshop’ where I show you my lyric-writing process and what sort of considerations I take into account when writing.
A third segment might deal with singing concerns, e.g., vocal health, how best to prepare for live performances or recording sessions from a vocal standpoint, etc.
Let me know if you guys have additional ideas/suggestions.
~YHP
There’s now a total of 4 original tracks up, under the “original songs” tab. Let me know what you guys think about everything. The songwriting, the singing, etc.
This is probably my favorite:
