Here is a link to a song I just finished up last night. It’s called “Jefferson,” and it’s about the tiny East Texas town that my mother’s family have lived in for several generations. Mom lives there still, in the post-Civil-War house on the hill that I grew up knowing as my Pa-Pa and Boots’ house. (My grandmother, the legend went, was small enough to fit inside a cowboy boot when she was a baby — thus the nickname).
The song is a piano ballad that contains a series of literal images from visits there in my youth. For you fellow recording nerds out there, I recorded it with Sonar and some software synthesizers by Cakewalk. I used plug-ins by Line 6 and Ik Multimedia, among others. I used an AT 4047 as my main vocal mic, with a ribbon mic for background vocals, and Line 6 and Hagstrom guitars and my old Epiphone bass (with a “toaster” style pickup in it). Everything went through a gray market “Neve” style preamp.
Hope you enjoy it! You can listen to it as often as you wish at the above link; if you’d rather purchase it, you can do so via iTunes here.
Here are the lyrics:
Jefferson, by Christopher Ave
Hide inside the old clubhouse my Mama’s Daddy made
Fly beside me as I rush to the moss beside the glade
Climb up the narrow stairs that lead to the attic mysteries
Sit down upon the old green rocker and sing your melodies
Oh hear the mournful song
of the lonely midnight train
So near, it won’t be long
till the morning’s sad refrain
So come down with me to my history
With hopes displayed, where outside games were made up, lost and won
Just walk with me on those red brick streets
And see the way my worries were undone
In Jefferson
City kid of eight or nine with glasses on my face
The folks had split and I was fine with changing up my place
The town was where I lost my cares in a southern state of grace
and learned the life away from strife in an ancient, languid pace
Oh hear the mournful song
of the lonely midnight train
So near, it won’t be long
till the morning’s sad refrain
So come down with me to my history
With hopes displayed, where outside games were made up, lost and won
Just walk with me on those red brick streets
And see the way my worries were undone
In Jefferson
(bridge)
In Jefferson
the only time I saw
my paw paw cry
he’d lost his bride
So come down with me to my history
With hopes displayed, where outside games were made up, lost and won
Just walk with me on those red brick streets
And see the way my worries were undone…
In Jefferson
Cakewalk just announced a free update for its flagship Sonar recording software suite. Sonar 8.5.3 focuses on improvements to its useful Audiosnap feature, which allows you to manipulate timing of audio files very much like have long been able to++ do with MIDI files. If you’re a registered Sonar owner you can find the update here.
Sonar is my recording software of choice. I am planning a computer hardware upgrade soon; when I’m done putting the new beast together I plan to write about how Sonar 8.5 works in 64-bit mode on a fairly modern (i5 quad-core processor) machine.
This piece of computer animated scenes focusing on architecture is a fantastic multimedia experience. Even more impressive: creator Alex Roman not only created the CG images himself, he also recorded the haunting musical score, using Cakewalk’s Sonar and East/West orchestral samples. He said the soundtrack is “based on” works by Michael Laurence Edward Nyman. (The Departure) and Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. (Le Carnaval des animaux)
Here is the just-released music video for my song “Serendipity.” It was conceived, shot and edited by the fabulous Elie Gardner of St. Louis. She did a great job, given what she had to work with!
As I wrote last year in a blog post, “Serendipity” was my attempt to say that even a calamity — in this case, a flood — can end up being a positive thing. Musically I was going for a Tom Petty/Jeff Lynne/ELO/George Harrison kind of sound. I recorded it via Sonar Producer Edition, using an Audio Technica 4047 and a Groove Tubes Brick preamp, for all you fellow recording nerds.
And, if by some odd chance you really like the song, it IS available on iTunes or Amazon.
Unlike “Copy Editor’s Lament (The Layoff Song),” “Serendipity” has nothing to do with the newspaper industry. I wrote “Serendipity” to make the point that some life development that may seem bad — even disasterous — can actually work out for the good. As I explained in this blog post earlier this year, I used flooding as a metaphor for the bad stuff; I wrote the lyrics after some particularly bad rain and flooding in the St. Louis area last year.
Musically, I was going for a Jeff Lynne/Tom Petty/George Harrison kind of sound, with jangly 12-string guitars and some (for me) expansive background vocals on the chorus. For you recording fanatics, I tracked and mixed it in my humble Getting Better Recording studio using Sonar, an Audio-Technica 4047 microphone, a Line 6 Variax guitar, a Hofner-copy bass from Rondo Music, a Groove Tubes preamp and a bunch of plug-ins from IK Multimedia, Line 6, Antares, Cakewalk, etc.
In the end, it still sounds like a Chris Ave song, for good or ill. In any event, I hope you enjoy it!
Today Cakewalk releases the latest version of its flagship Sonar production suite, Sonar 8.5. It’s an interesting hybrid – more than a maintenance upgrade, but a bit less than a fully new version. Looking over the details at the link above, I believe you’ll be getting a lot for $79.
Well, Cakewalk has been a PC-only company since its inception. Is this move a precursor to Cakewalk jumping into the Mac-compatible software market? If so, that sets up a battle of the titans among Cakewalk’s flagship Sonar, Pro Tools and Logic. As a Cakewalk loyalist, I know who I’m rooting for…..
