It makes sense to state up front what is the “mission” of this blog. What is its motivation?

The initial driver for this blog can be divided into 2 projects:

• blogging about my support of Jon Raney’s current release.
• blogging about the creation and release of my first album.

Jon’s current release Waltz For Talia is an excellent Jazz trio album where one will find melodic ballads to straight ahead Jazz to blues and Brazilian feels. Blogging on this project will invariably consist of issues such as copyrights, royalties, distribution, packaging i.e. a journal of what we will try to do to make it a successful “indie” album in this new brave world of the independent music biz.

In my case, my project is basically in its infancy. Its a journey whose objective is to create a CD of original music and in the process to not only become a better composer but also a better musician and guitar player. As I have blogged before, to me composition has to be the focus of practise. Blogging about my project will tend to deal with issues such as music composition and arrangement, digital recording and mixing, music gear and software and some aspects of guitar technique i.e. as pertinent to the compositions in question.

Perhaps this will be of interest to others which would be great since input would just make this experience all that richer but as I have also blogged before this diary of this adventure will help to keep focus on all of those baby steps and little mountains that have to be conquered to attain the long term objective of becoming a composer and musician that I am happy with.

My first track on my first CD is inspired by my desire to exploit the beautiful open sounds of the guitar. What I mean is that I select voicings that use as many open strings as possible with the effect that there is a ringing pedal that basically carries through an entire progression. In my case the top two strings. I really like this a lot and as a matter of fact so far most of the ideas that I have come up with include this notion to at least some degree.

The Intro

The intro is basically a minor I chord to the V dominant with coloration i.e. b9, the dominant chord is also based of a bass note that is 1/2 step away from the bass note of the minor I chord, in order to do a nice “side-stepping” latin bass line i.e. one where I am going back forth between the two notes. The intro is currently 8 bars long.

The Form

Basically:

• Intro
• A
• B
• C
• A
• B
• Outro

Where the first AB is repeated probably about 3x then followed by new territory in turned followed with restating of the melody and finally with a vamp which fades off , the vamp right now essentially being the same vamp that started off the tune. Anyhow, that is the plan for now.

The A section is 16 bars as is the the B section but because of the transitions and cadence points it is really not quite as even as AB but I think even more interesting for that reason.

The tune is in 3/4 and its in a perky latin feel.

What’s Next

The melody is. I’m hearing a Tango like Piazolla thing. Some of the tunes of Al DiMeola Grande Passion album seem to resonate. I think I’ll listen to that album and Piazolla next week on my iAudio i.e. on the way to work, so at least a couple hours a day.

I’m helping a friend Jon Raney get his album ready to ship to CDBaby. Jon had the master tracks so in this case there was no help with recording. However, we both felt that the general over all volume of the album could be raised a bit. I used Adobe Audition formerly known as CoolEdit to  group “normalize” the tracks. I’ll talk about normalization some time later. What I want to talk about today is about Audition’s restoration effect called the “Click/Pop Eliminator”. You see normalization did a great job i.e. which was to raise the overall loudness of the tracks. Unfortunately it also raised a couple “faux pas” in the recording which were not very audible in the original recording but quite apparent now due to normalization. Jon had slightly moved his piano chair which got picked up by the mics.

Fortunately, Audition’s Click/Pop Eliminator very easily and basically with default settings was able to eliminate the transient chair creak. Here is what the user interface to the effect looks like:

Here is a blurb from the help text for the effect:

The Restoration > Click/Pop Eliminator effect detects and removes clicks and pops. Like the Auto Click/Pop Eliminator, this effect is ideal if you want to clean up the sound of vinyl recordings before transferring them to CD or another digital medium. The Click/Pop Eliminator, however, provides a much wider range of controls, letting you customize settings to repair other transient artifacts such as vocal plosives or radio static.

This is an increidibly handy thing to have and it worked like a charm. I also used the Graphic EQ effect to roll off the bass and perk up the piano on another tune and it worked great. I’ll probably blog about some of these effects at some other time. If everything goes right we should be sending some CDs to the U.S. copyright office next week and possibly to CDBaby as well.