This article is part of a series on the recording of my song Somewhere Someone Cares. You can find the articles in the series under the category SSC.
Whoops! Last week’s update didn’t get published. As I was finishing up the previous week’s update, I had to go to the emergency room. I won’t get into what happened, but my entire Labor Day got screwed up. It took me most of last week to get back on track. But in the process of getting back on track, I made a preview of Somewhere Someone Cares that I can share.
Momma wants a mixer
I recently found a tool I had been wanting. As a former recording and live sound engineer, I love having a physical mixing console. I find it easier to adjust faders with my hands rather than with a mouse. I know I can buy physical mixing desks that I can use with my computer via MIDI. The problem is that they’re expensive for an older person on a fixed income. The space to set one up is also at a premium in my studio.
Enter TouchDAW
I had run a search for an app I could use on my tablet before, but hadn’t found anything. I looked again recently, I found a thread on the Linux Musicians forums. The thread I found is on controlling Ardour with an Android device. I had seen it before, but it has a link to a site in Japanese. Since I can’t read Japanese, I had ignored it.
What I hadn’t noticed before was a reference to an app called TouchDAW. The developer calls it “a full-featured DAW controller combined with some general purpose MIDI tools running on Android™ devices and recent Chromebooks.” TouchDAW loooks like it’s just what I was looking for. I installed the app on my tablet, but found a problem on my laptop. It requires a program called rtpMIDI, and that’s not available for the version of Debian Linux my laptop runs.
I run SolydK Linux 12 on my laptop. SolydK 12 is built on Debian 12 (Bookworm), but rtpMIDI was recently rebuilt and requires Debian 13 (Trixie). There is a disk image of SolydK 13 available for installing (and testing), which is good news. I’ll update my laptop as soon as the updare script is released. Then I can install rtpMIDI and TouchDAW. TouchDAW has a demo you can try, and if it’s the solution I think it is, I’ll gladly pay the $4.99 to buy the full program.
I can haz guitar tracks nao?
I’m still working on recording the rhythm guitar track under my fingers. After adding the organ solo to the song, I needed to add room for it to my files in Ardour. I ended up printing out the master score for the song. Now I can see exactly where the regions from the organ solo going out needed to be.
I remembered that I had started creating the lead vocal melody music, but what I wrote wasn’t accurate. I couldn’t lock in the syncopated rhythm. The melody itself isn’t hard to get. After all, I’ve been singing the song to myself (and my furry son Chuck) for two decades. My fingers couldn’t get the rhythms right to play it into MuseScore. I ended up writing the music old school, one note at a time. I now have sheet music with lyrics for an original song for the first time ever.
Wait, now the timings are wrong
I had jotted down the timings for each section of my song on the lyric sheet, but since I added the organ solo, I had to redo the timings. It turns out the file I was using for the lyric sheet went to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky at some point, so I had to recreate the file. That’s actually not a problem, because now I can add the timings to the lyric sheet document itself.
As I tried to add the melody to the score, the rhythm for the lyrics, I kept finding that the rhythm wasn’t right in one spot. But when I started trying to place the lyrics, the rhythm of the line fell into place. I now have not only the lead vocal part written out, but I also have the harmony vocals written. I plan on eventually creating a piano/vocal version of the song in case someone wants it at some point.
Moving right along…
Once I had the vocals written, I turned my attention to the music for the Hammond B3 organ and Fender Rhodes. I had preliminary tracks for those instruments on BandLab, and I was able to finish their music pretty quickly. I still have to come up with the guitar and organ solos, but I’m going to hold off on that until after I get reference guitar and lead vocals recorded.
Houston, we have a preview
Since I have the majority of the music for the song written, I created a preview video of the song with MuseScore. This will give you an idea of how the song sounds, and you can see what the lyrics are and how they fit into the arrangement.
A flute covers the lead vocals in the video. Synthesized “ahs” cover the harmonies to give you an idea of what I have in mind. You can see the vocals with the top stave of the score, but in case they’re not legible in the video, they’re in the description on YouTube.
Once I get the reference guitar and vocal tracks recorded, I’ll post another preview of the song. I won’t promise it will be a preview of the whole song like this one is, but it should give you a better sense of where the song is going.
Meanwhile, in Second Life
My virtual self is opening a new store in Second Life. The store is pretty much laid out, and I’m in the process of making a new sign for the store in Blender. Once that’s made, and I get some plants in the store, there will be an inworld Nanci’s Naughties store for the first time since COVID hit. Keep an eye on the website, follow my avatar on Bluesky, or join the Nanci’s Naughties SL group to find out when the new store opens.
What’s next?
I need to bring the new, longer drum chart into Ardour as a MIDI file and re-tweak the track to correct some differences between what MuseScore plays and what my virtual drumkit will play. A MIDI file of the longer bass line will get uploaded to BandLab so I can export it using their virtual bass. Then I need to get some serious Strat time and get at least a reference track for it and the lead vocals.
I’m still dealing with the thing that drove me to the emergency room last week, but after a doctor’s appointment today, it’s more manageable until I can schedule an appointment to go in and see about resolving the issue.
Can you believe it’s already September? It seems the older I get, the faster time flies by me. I hope to get next week’s update published on time, which should be late Sunday or early Monday. Take care of yourself, and don’t let the assholes harsh your mellow too much.