The Making of ” Baby Blues ”
Posted By Scott on August 16, 2010
Using tritones and a simple left hand Root-flat5-5 bass line I came up with an easy to play tune I titled “Baby Blues”. It’s got to be easy or I couldn’t play it (lol). Baby Blues is a bad little girl doggy who doesn’t want to fetch a stick or ball. The song lyrics I made up pretty quick and they don’t blend to well in spots but suffice. I made many mistakes when I recorded and mixed my first songs. Now I’ve learned to have input volume levels near zero or just below when recording all the tracks. Then tweak any tracks down a bit if need be in the final mixes. In general I’ve found when everything is playing near the same volume the music sounds pleasant.
BB Baby Blues Singles Cover Art
So how do I do the recording and mixing? I will elaborate on that for those that might want to know. Recording music is a complicated affair but now that I have done over a dozen songs I can produce an entrie song in a few hours. My computer is a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop running Windows Vista. For capture, editing and mixing I used Sonar LE 6 which is DAW software (digital audio workstation), Sonar LE came with my Roland Juno Stage.
Sonar LE - tracks in Baby Blues project
For the Bass and Drum tracks I used the DR-880 EZ-Compose feature. The Ballad Bass EZ option 6 has an underlying background tone and I used I believe a Latin option for the percussion effect. EZ-Compose has a 12 bar blues pattern preset so I used that and set the key to C. The DR-880 plugs into a USB port and I have the bass set to midi channel 3 and drum to midi channel 10. So I record the 12 bar pattern into two midi tracks into Sonar LE. Because the timing isn’t perfect as I don’t know how to sync things up I usually got to use the nudge feature in Sonar to move the tracks a few ticks one way or the other so the first note starts right on the beat one. That done I copy and paste the 12 bars duplicating several times to make one long track. I then go in using the Sonar note editor and modify the last bar or add a bar to make an ending measure that fades out.
The second step I record the left hand track for 12 bars and usually replicate those 12 bars multiple times also. The next step is recording the right hand track and usually I play the whole song in one step. If I do have troubles and make mistakes I’ll use the punch in and punch out feature in Sonar LE to correct. I like to play the whole song so there will be differences in the notes, volume and rhythm otherwise the song will surely sound repetitive. Midi track wise I have the left hand track set to midi track 1 and right hand track set to midi track 2 and the Juno Stage keyboard range split as needed. Often I have a different piano sound for each side of the split.
For “Baby Blues” song I have a second right hand lead piano track. I recorded this lead piano track using a heavy left hand on the modulation wheel which made the piano sound a bit like a guitar. I think that was the first time I ever used that mod wheel/stick in a song and the effect sounds quite nice I think. I recorded that track in one take just improvising and though the playing is not perfection the notes vary greatly between each set of 12 bars which gives the song some flavor.
I use a Behringer Xenyx FX1222 USB mixer. USB is great because my laptop connects right to the mixer for my audio sound in and out. So that’s three USB connects, the Juno Stage keyboard, BOSS DR-880 drum machine and Behringer mixer! My speakers are connected to the main outs of the Behringer.
Behringer 1222 mixer , connects left to right mike, RD700, Juno Stage, BOSS DR880, output to speakers, headphone, not show in back is USB audio to computer runing Sonar LE
I lost count of the steps but at this point what I do is play the midi tracks in Sonar LE (which is playing the Juno Stage and BOSS DR-880 and record that mix to a new Sonar instrument audio track via the USB audio connect from the mixer.
Recording the vocal. I mute my midi tracks and sing along with my instrument audio track. You got to listen to the sound of course through headphones while singing into the mike. If you used speakers instead of headphones the sound is going to echo back with your vocal audio track. The Shure SM58 microhone is plugged into the Behringer and I have some reverb and equal effects on it the Behringer provides. The headphones are plugged into the headphone jack of the Behringer so I can hear my voice and the instrument audio track. I don’t why it works but I’m very glad it does in that the instrument audio track sound going into the mixer via the USB .. does not come back to computer .. thus all I get recording the vocal audio track in Sonar is just my voice nothing else. This setup my friends was a real mind bender for me to understand and accomplish and believe me seeing it all work and having everything still sync up perfect in the tracks is a credit to how well Sonar LE works! However don’t think I have the perfect setup here going as I do have some 60 cycle hum going on though I suspect everyone does.
For the dog bark sound I used the Juno Stage GM2 patch 228 dog bark sound effect. I just put the mike in front of the speaker and put the barks in the vocal audio track. I thought about scattering barks throughout the song but went with just 3 in the beginning and 3 at the end.
The final step in Sonar is to use Bounce feature which mixes my vocal audio and instrument audio tracks together into a final audio track. Of course I can preview the mix and usually I need to adjust the vocal level down just a bit and I add a bit of reverb and compression. I take the final audio track wav file Sonar built and use Sound Forge to insert some blank space at the end and front and save it to the wav and mp3 formats I need.
To create the sheet music in Finale Composer I save my Sonar LE project to a .mid file, open that up in Finale and copy and paste the tracks it into my new Finale document. Finale is a great little composer program. I’m able to print to Primo PDF Windows Vista provides and get my nice PDF file version of the sheet music.
The mp3 music track of “Baby Blues” can be downloaded from my CDBABY page for free. The sheet music you can find on my BB Basics Files download page (see menu on right side of this page). Follow the instructions on the Boogie Basics page on how to get the password for the download page.
