Hear My Song, But Let’s Break Down The Process First

I’ve been a computer teacher, I’ve been a call center agent, I’ve been through a lot of emceeing gigs. But let me tell you my friends that nothing could be as equally exciting as these recent activities I’ve been dealing with: home music recording.

I hope you’ve followed this article series I’ve been babbling here lately, so it will be easier for you to jump right into the discussion that will follow.

So how do we exactly do our thing? How did we get through the process to complete our upcoming digital album? Here’s the process folks.

Rewriting Gifter’s old songs

We originally planned to do cover songs first months ago, so we can have some side-income along the way. But knowing that the COVID scare prevented many bars from opening, we decided to skip it and go straight to practicing Gifter’s original compositions.

Ever since during his college days, Gifter has been writing songs already. Years later as he became a teacher, he still wrote a few hymns. We re-tailored those songs so it would fit our “alternative-acoustic setup.”

It was one of the earliest challenges we have to go through since most of Gifter’s songs were crafted to fit in a “fully-noisy band” with a male lead and backup singers. Apparently, he never thought that his fate would lead him to a direction in which he’d be teaming up with a newbie female keyboardist from Bukidnon.

So for many weeks, Gifter re-wrote huge parts of some of his old songs which he sang for years, so I would sing some of them, and so the back up vocals would suit a female singer.

Writing new songs

From my perspective, all of Gifter’s fully written songs sound good enough already. But being so obsessed with our possible “road to greatness,” he decided he should write 2 more songs that would be perfect for our tandem.

He then wrote a “scientific love song” in which there would be no guitar parts – because he wants to project his “emotero side” which he believes would only happen if we would have a piano-themed love song with him on the vocals and me on accompaniment.

To balance it out, he also wrote another acoustic song in which there would be no piano parts – it would then be my chance to project the “singerist in me” hehe.

Practicing our ten-song repertoire

This is were our bond as friends and as music partners was truly strengthened. For nearly 3 months, we spent 5 days a week, with 4 hours of practice each time. It was truly grueling since aside from dealing with the hardships of perfecting tunes, harmonies, and voice blends, I would also have to deal with Gifter’s arrogance and annoying behavior.

Thankfully though, I got the hang of it to the point that I didn’t notice I’m also becoming as arrogant as him, kind of… slightly, hehe. When we finally polished the tenth song, I can remember I felt so elated like – I graduated from a very hard educational course. It felt very satisfying.

“We have ten songs that we wrote, arranged, and polished ourselves… what an elation it really is to feel like a professional music artist!”

Recording the instrumentals

Using Gifter’s old laptop, my phone, my keyboard and his acoustic guitar, we recorded the instrumentation parts of our songs right inside Gifter’s bedroom. To make our parts as close to being perfect as possible, Gifter decided we should record our parts per section.

For instance, he would record the verse, chorus, and refrain of his guitar parts, and copy and paste them whenever possible. This way, it would be easier for us to manage the mistakes we make. Once I arrive at his place, we would then record the piano parts, and merge them into his guitar parts.

After I go home, Gifter would then work his magic with some computer software and countless hours of research. This is where I feel so bad for my buddy… he works so hard and rarely rests. “Oh, if only I could do more to compensate for all his efforts.”

Dealing with Gifter’s frustration

After nearly a month of recording and re-recording some parts, we came to a point when we need to accept the limitations of our equipment and resources. I can see how frustrated Gifter’s face was when he realized that his knowledge and skill as a musician was hindered due to our lack of professional equipment.

The least I could do was tell him, “As long as we can get the message of our songs clearly to our listeners, it should be enough.” I told him that there are songs out there that were recorded in a raw and semi-unprofessional way, but still got famous.

“We just have to be satisfied with what we have, for now,” I added. I further convinced him that once we have a bigger budget soon, we will just improve our output.

Recording the vocal parts

I can say this is where the real fun begins. While listening to our initial outputs, Gifter commended me for singing better than him – something that I have a hard time believing. I don’t know if he’s just being too nice but he said my voice sounds better than his.

He thought maybe it’s because my mouth was closer to the mic when I sang. But he then conceded that his husky voice is just not as nice to my feminine, clearer voice.

To grasp what I truly mean by this, you may listen to the first song we recorded. It’s a tagalog song Gifter wrote with the title, “Ngiti At Pighati (Smile and Grief).”

Here’s the Google Drive link to our first original song:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y0LSwgLOv6cxy_xnQarfzKFMcWyED1sP/view?usp=sharing

Please bear in mind that it’s only a rough edit. We will still improve this once our mixing skills get better. If you can give constructive criticisms on our first song, that would be such a great help for us.

Thanks for reading!

Keep safe everyone.