Click here to download the files.

To use it, load the multi up in Kontakt 5.0.2. If it alerts you to missing sample files, point it to the Kontakt 5 factory library, then the full instrument will load.

To play it, hit the C0 key to start and stop the drum loop (which will automatically sync to your host or MasterKontrol tempo). Keys from F2 and below will play an upright bass, and keys from F#2 and above will play a layered combination of acoustic piano, string section, and tenor saxophone. For a demonstration, see the video below. It’s not intended to be the greatest, detailed high-quality instrument ever designed, but it’s functional and useful as quick inspiration for a demo or for songwriting sketches.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Check out these related projects:

   Kontakt Tutorial Videos

   Vinyl record samples for free download

   Kontakt 2 Power book published

This article isn’t meant to be a primer on WordPress. If you’re new to the platform, you may want to visit the home pages at WordPress.org and WordPress.com (the former is for those who’d like to host it themselves, the latter for those who would like it hosted for them). But if you’re already up and running with WordPress, there’s a nice group of plug-ins that are of special interest to musicians, bands, and artists. All the plug-ins mentioned on this page are free.

MANAGING TOUR DATES

ArtistDataPress: For users of Sonicbids’ ArtistData, ArtistDataPress displays your ArtistData feed on a page, post, or as a sidebar widget.

Event Organiser: Create and maintain events, including complex reoccurring patterns, venue management (with Google maps), calendars and customisable event lists.

Events Manager: Fully featured event registration management including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, and booking management.

Gigs Calendar: This plugin is geared toward bands and musicians to manage and display a calendar of their gigs within WordPress. It’s meant to be as easy as possible for both the musician and the fan. It even manages venue data complete with mapping and ticket links.

GigPress: GigPress is a powerful live performance listing and management plugin designed for musicians and other performers. Manage all of your upcoming and past performances right from within the WordPress admin, and display them on your site using simple shortcodes, PHP template tags, or the GigPress widget on your WordPress-powered website.

WordTour: WordTour is a comprehensive WordPress plug-in for performing artists and their agents. WordTour offers you a no-fuss time-saving solution to events management and a whole lot more.

PLAYING MUSIC ON THE SITE

Degradeable HTML5 Audio and Video: Shortcodes for HTML5 video and audio, with auto-inserted links to alternative file types, and fallback options. (I highly recommend using an HTML5-compatible audio and video player.)

GrooveShark for WordPress: The Grooveshark plugin allows you to insert music links or Grooveshark Widgets into your site.

ReverbNation Widgets: This plugin lets you embed music players, video players, tunewidgets, email collectors and other ReverbNation widgets on your WordPress blog.

SoundCloud Shortcode: The SoundCloud Shortcode plugin allows you to integrate a player widget from SoundCloud into your WordPress Blog by using a WordPress short codes.

StreamPad: Streampad gives you everything you need to play back the music you post. Any ‘.mp3′ file you link to or any link with class ‘spmp3′, will automatically show up in the Streampad player at the bottom of your page. The Streampad player will sit at the bottom of your page as a bottom bar.

Here’s a link to 14 Free Music Player Plugins for WordPress. I would personally recommend sticking to HTML5 players and not Flash ones, in order to insure maximum compatibility and accessibility.

PHOTO GALLERIES

NextGen Gallery: NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.

WordPress Flickr Gallery: If you use Flickr to host your photos already, this plug-in handles integrating your Flickr collection into a WordPress site.

PhotoBucket Widget: PhotoBucket Widget works as a widget, making very easy for you to embed in sidebars from your PhotoBucket account.

FotoBook: Fotobook is a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account(s) and import all of your photo albums for use in your WordPress site.

SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

It goes without saying that it’s wise to have Facebook Like buttons, Tweet This buttons, and Google Plus icons on each page of unique content of the site. Numerous plug-ins already offer that in various configurations. Beyond that, here’s some plug-ins that offer unique additional capabilities:

Facebook Comments for WordPress: Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (You can see this plug-in in action at the bottom of this page.)

LifeStream: Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Official Topspin WordPress Plugin: Quickly and easily integrate your Topspin Offers into customized, sortable and dynamically generated Store Pages.

Here’s a very helpful and definitive article from Smashing Magazine on How to Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in WordPress.

PODCASTING

Blubrry: Blubrry PowerPress brings the essential features for podcasting to WordPress including full iTunes support, web audio/video media players and more.

PodPress: PodPress lets you host audio files, then output a podcast feed and manage the stream from the WordPress admin area.

OTHER

Chords and Lyrics: This plugin assists in the creation of staffless lead sheets, also called chord sheets.

Easyfileshop: If you’d like to sell files directly (for example, offering a ZIP file of your album), this is one of the very easiest ways to do it. It lets visitors buy using PayPal and receive an instant download link to the file they’ve purchased.

Instant Band Site by Nimbit: Easily create a complete artist-band website with fan signup, gig listings, storefront and more.

Music Affiliate Pro: Search and insert affiliate links for music in seconds. Works with major digital music outlets like iTunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify, and eMusic.

Musopress Discography: Created for Bandcamp users, this plug-in creates a Discography Custom Post Type and allows you to import your albums from Bandcamp.

WP Bandcamp: Embed the Bandcamp Player into your website pages using a widget or the post editor short code.

WP Vibedeck: For Vibedeck users: Play and sell your music online for free. Embed the VibeDeck audio player and store using a simple shortcode or widget.

NON-MUSIC PLUG-INS THAT EVERYONE SHOULD USE

Finally, here’s a quick list of plug-ins that, while not music-specific, I highly recommended for all WordPress sites: Broken Link Checker (automatically scans your site periodically and e-mails you if any links are broken), Google XML Sitemaps (lets Google know about everything on your site), W3 Total Cache (speeds up your entire site by caching it), WP-DBManager (manages your database and allows you to back it up), and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (intelligently chooses related posts to display at the bottom of the current post – always give your visitors something else to read if the current page hasn’t whetted their appetite!).

MORE RESOURCES

There are uncountable numbers of WordPress resources on the web, but just to list a few of my favorites, visit Smashing Magazine’s WordPress section, SixRevisions’ WordPress section, and Webdesigner Depot’s WordPress section. If you’d like to delve deeper into WordPress for musicians via a webinar, check out the Music Marketing Webinar hosted by my friends Michael Brandvold and Brian Thompson. Also check out my article The Entrepreneurial Guide to Being a Musician in the 21st Century, which contains numerous ideas on promotions, marketing, and more.

Check out these related projects:

   Kontakt Tutorial Videos

   Vinyl record samples for free download

   Kontakt 2 Power book published

I’m a firm believer that Billy Joel is one of the finest craftsmen in the history of pop songwriting. As a musician, pianist, melodist, and lyricist, he has constantly brought an impeccable originality and mastery at creating three- to four-minute masterpieces. He’s also incredibly diverse. If you’ve seen him in concert, you’ve seen his ability to morph like a chameleon between musical styles, absorbing legends like Ray Charles (“Baby Grand“), Joe Cocker, 50′s doo-wop (the entire An Innocent Man album), Franki Valli and the Four Seasons (“Uptown Girl“), The Rolling Stones (“You May Be Right“), The Beatles (in countless instances), Beethoven (“This Night“), the Russian Romantic tradition (“Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” and others, especially the Storm Front album), and more. If I had the time, I could write dozens of Songblogs that traverse his almost four decades making records, and each one would be completely unique. Billy’s genius lies in his innate ability to assimilate a wide variety of influences, and turn them around into new original songs that pay homage to the past but are their own unique and valuable creations that bear the stamp of his unique personality.

In today’s Songblog, I’ll look at one of his relatively early ballads, “She’s Always A Woman,” taken from the 1977 album The Stranger, which won multiple Grammy awards and which many consider to be among the best pop albums of all time.

Billy’s primary instrument is the piano, and this song is a very simple piano-vocal ballad. Billy has said that this song was somewhat influenced by Gordon Lightfoot. The song opens with a very simple chord sequence that lays the foundation of the entire song:

After the first verse is played and sung so simply, the piano begins an arpeggiated pattern (0:29 in the YouTube video above) that serves to propel the song forward, and once we’ve heard two verses (which stay very simple harmonically), we hit the first chorus (0:56), which forms a beautiful contrast as it cycles through several chord worlds before taking us back neatly to the simple verse. The chorus is in two halves, the second half (1:13) pivoting to a surprise minor i chord which gives the structure so much strength and sense of journey.

Especially in the verse, you get the sense that the accompaniment is following the vocal. The beginning of the song feels like a 6/8 waltz, but then the time signature patterns start breaking up and being grouped into twos, threes, and fours, depending on how much extra breathing room a given vocal line needs.

The lyrics, taken by themselves, are beautiful poetry, and need no interpretation as their meaning is crystal clear. He’s extolling the beauty of his woman, and mesmerized by her despite her flaws.

She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child,
But she’s always a woman to me

Billy is frequently asked about his writing process, and whether the music or the lyrics comes first. For him, the answer is always the music first:

I write the music first and then if I like the music I write lyrics. I think every piece of music has something apparent in it lyrically. For me it’s like fate knocking on the door. Beethoven’s symphonies were written when, if you look at the time period, there was some awesome stuff going on. And you think that’s what he must have been writing about. But maybe it was something as banal as what’s with the rent? It’s like Michelangelo sculpting marble. Inside that marble is the sculpture, he’s just got to find it. That’s how I write lyrics. I write music and then ask, “What does this music say to me?” I wrote a song called James, and the guy’s name was not James. But had I said Fred it wouldn’t have worked.

An illuminating early demo version of this song exists, in which you can hear Billy halfway through writing the song. All of the music is there, most of the melody is there, but most of the lyrics are not, except for a couple of words which he begins to hang on the melody:

I love hearing this demo, realizing that he really worked on the music and melody exclusively until he felt they were as solid as they could be, before he began to approach the lyrics.

If you’re new to Billy Joel, I highly recommend the recently-released documentary/concert Last Play At Shea, which documents Billy’s historic 2008 concerts that were the last concerts played at Shea Stadium in New York before the complex was torn down. The film is a blended documentary which interweaves Billy’s history with the history of New York and the Mets.

Billy is also an eloquent speaker about his craft. Simply searching YouTube for “billy joel questions and answers” reveals many search results of live audiences interviewing Billy about his life and work, and there’s a gold mine of insight there.

What is it about this song that makes it a great song to you? Leave a thought in the comments below.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, and don’t already have it, support the artist by buying the album (iTunes/Amazon) or single (iTunes/Amazon).

This post is part of the Songblog series, a series of essays dissecting a selection of popular songs from a songwriting and production perspective. Please contribute to the discussion by leaving comments below. If you have suggestions for a future Songblog article, please leave it in the comments or mention it via Twitter or the contact page. I can’t respond to every comment, but will try to incorporate ideas into future articles. Subscribe to future Songblogs by subscribing to this RSS feed or following me on Twitter.

Check out these related projects:

   Songblog: Al Jarreau / Mornin’

   Songblog: Peter Gabriel / In Your Eyes

   Ginny Owens: The Sessions for Get In, I’m Driving

I’ve been working with Chicago-born soul singer-songwriter and BMG/Radar/Bug artist Dylan Lloyd recently. One of our songs, “Thankful,” has just been released. Stream the entire song above, or own it by hopping over to iTunes!

“Thankful” is a co-write between me and Dylan. Over a few writing sessions, we came up with the haunting persistent vibe set up by an incessantly four-on-the-floor drum pattern augmented by a simple electric guitar part and a Rhodes. Dylan crafted much of the lyrical content around the topic of healing from depression and on gratefulness as an antidote to hopelessness:

The tears of a cloud formed an ocean of pain
I forgot how the sun felt on my face
You were too hard to reach, I was losing control
Till your light cast the dark from the seat of my soul

See the signs
Let it open up your eyes
Love your life
And be thankful for this time
The fall was a long way down but
I had to reach for something to believe in
You always believed in me

It was tearing me down from the inside out
Every wall that I built trapped in the sound
I was losing the fight and the will to survive
I let the sky unfold and show me the light

See the signs
Let it open up your eyes
Love your life
And be thankful for this time
The fall was a long way down but
I had to reach for something to believe in
You always believed in me

Words and Music by David Das and Dylan Lloyd
©2011 Das Bunk Music (BMI) / Radar/Bug/BMG Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved.

Stream the entire song above, and buy it on iTunes or Amazon!

I’ve previously worked with Dylan as he represented the USA in the international 2011 Crimea Music Festival, singing another of his songs along with a cover version of Elton John’s “Sacrifice” which I produced for him. “Sacrifice” is also available on iTunes and Amazon.

Check out these related projects:

   A song on Virtue’s new album, Free

   Producing the new Shunna Jones project

   Writing and Producing Amy Krebs’s New Single

Written in concerto style, this piece is for a cappella choir with a soprano soloist. I was captivated by the text, which begins and ends with these heartbreaking bookends:

Weep not, weep not,
She is not dead;
She’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband–weep no more;
Grief-stricken son–weep no more;
Left-lonesome daughter –weep no more;
She only just gone home.

In between the bookends, a beautiful narrative spins, a story of God dealing with a grief-stricken woman (partially excerpted here):

Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great, high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eye fell of Sister Caroline.

Then off to the races with an adventure:

Call Death!–Call Death!
And the echo sounded down the streets of heaven
Till it reached away back to that shadowy place,
Where Death waits with his pale, white horses.

And Death heard the summons,
And he leaped on his fastest horse,
Pale as a sheet in the moonlight.
Up the golden street Death galloped,

This piece, which has not yet been performed, follows the form of the original poem exactly, with a somewhat dissonant reflective introduction, and then a series of episodes at medium and fast tempos as the story unfolds, concluding with a return to the introduction to cap off the piece. In the faster adventure sections, I spent a lot of time writing the highly rhythmic inner lines to create minimalistic pulsing textures to propel the movement.

The score of this composition is available for purchase for $9.99, which includes unlimited reproduction rights for one choir/conductor/director to perform the piece in a season. The first page of the score to Go Down, Death can be previewed for free by clicking the thumbnail to the right. If you are a choral director who would like to peruse the score for evaluation, please use the Contact page.

Check out these related projects:

   Two Poems of Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

   I Shall Know Why: a choral setting of Emily Dickinson

   Vocal arranging for NBC’s The Sing-Off

“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey is probably in the top tier of 80′s torch songs. Released in 1981 on Journey’s Escape album, it’s very much a part of pop culture, having been covered by numerous artists, featured in numerous movies and TV shows (The Wedding Singer, Family Guy, The Sopranos, Scrubs), and included as the climax of the premiere episode of Glee. It was written by Journey bandmates Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry, and Neil Schon. We’ll take a look at a few aspects of it that make it such a compelling song.

First, it’s extremely simple. That brings to mind what Lionel Richie once said: that simple and iconic is what he aims for as a songwriter.

“Can you write a song that people can name in four notes? If you can do that, you, my friend, have done the hardest thing in the world: you’ve written a simple song (laughs). If I sing, ‘You’re once…” and stop right there, you know the song ['Three Times a Lady']. You never heard a chord, a drum beat, or a cymbal crash, but you know where we’re going.”

-Lionel Richie, Performing Songwriter magazine, January/February 2009

Back to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” This song keeps it simple and memorable right from the beginning with a signature piano riff (called “one of the best opening keyboard riffs in rock” by AllMusic) and a simple I-V-vi-IV chord pattern (which has been used thousands of times before — see the Axis of Awesome demonstrate this in their famous YouTube video):

The compactness of the lyrics is focused. “Just a small-town girl,” reads the first line. Five notes, five simple words, as casual as they are evocative. Not “She was just a small-town girl,” not “Hailing from the quiet part of town.” Just a small-town girl. That concise, compact trend is found throughout this song — no unnecessarily extra words. The same thing happens with “just a city boy”: simple and natural. Like the Lionel Richie reference above, I could play or sing just those five notes on the piano without words, and that would be enough to identify the song, because their simplicity has become so iconic in pop culture.

The lyrics may be sparse, but there’s just enough detail to spin the story. Take a look at this verse:

Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit
He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere

The lyrics give us an outline of a scene — two lonely people with different backgrounds, hopping on a train going “anywhere” (what a poignant way to express their desire for change) — but enough is left to the imagination that, like a great novel, we’re left to paint our own visual picture of the scene, or where they might be going, or what their dissatisfaction might be.

There’s something very interesting about the structure too. The first verse is a double verse and is pretty extended — by 0:49 we haven’t heard anything more than the intro and the verse. That’s a long time in a four-minute pop song to not offer any contrasts or given the listener something new musically. The same piano riff continues, so there’s clearly some musical tension building while the remainder of the scene is painted by the lyrics. The ear is wondering: when is this buildup and repetition going to break open into something new?

Following that is a prechorus (based on the IV chord, beginning at 1:22), but it leads back to another verse (a single verse this time), which means the tension build continues, since we haven’t reached the payoff moment — the emotional release that we expect by the arrival of the chorus. The second verse is no more intense than the first, but in the second prechorus there’s a little more drive from the band. Still, after the second verse and prechorus, it leads to a instrumental section, then, unbelievably, back for a third verse and prechorus and instrumental chorus, which gives us the chorus melody for the first time (3:06). Finally, after the instrumental — 3:21 into the song — we hear the chorus for the first time and we feel the emotional payoff of that very long build. That must be some kind of record.

A special note about something I love about the drum pattern throughout the song: I appreciate that it’s not a stock beat with the kick on 1 and 3 and the snare on 2 and 4. Instead, drummer Steve Smith plays a low tom on beat 4 throughout, giving the overall feel of the song a slight hiccup as it moves forward then takes a step back. It never quite blossoms into a full-fledged standard groove; it’s always one snare short of that. It’s a refreshing touch that adds a timelessness to it. Even by the end of the song, when the chorus is repeated, that stop-go feel continues the sense of build and tension; we’re never relaxing into a traditional kick-1-3 and snare-2-4 groove.

The tone of the bass guitar is unusual. It’s definitely played with a pick (listen for the very clear attacks), sounds like a fretless bass (unusual in rock), and has a heavy dose of a chorus/flanger on it (not atypical for 80′s music). Yet these quirks give it the character that doesn’t distract from the song, but has become part of the signature sound of the song.

Great guitar tones, great vocal performance, great memorable keyboard, guitar, and drum riffs. It’s a classic all-round.

For further reading, producer and author Bobby Owsinski offers some additional thoughts on this song on his blog.

What is it about this song that makes it a great song to you? Leave a thought in the comments below.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, and don’t already have it, support the artist by buying the album (iTunes/Amazon) or single (iTunes/Amazon).

Check out these related projects:

   Songblog: Al Jarreau / Mornin’

   Songblog: Peter Gabriel / In Your Eyes

   Ginny Owens: The Sessions for Get In, I’m Driving

Paul Simon’s 1986 album Graceland is often talked of as being one of the greatest pop albums of all time (by both Rolling Stone and Time Magazine, as well as others). Much of it was recorded in South Africa, with South African musicians, and showcases the cross-pollination of Paul’s pop-folk roots (beginning with his days in Simon & Garfunkel) with the irresistible rhythms of African drums and grooves. Read more about the album at its wiki or at the Rolling Stone/Time links above. Today’s Songblog track, “The Boy In The Bubble,” is about the first song on the album.

Unlike many songwriters, when asked whether his music or his lyrics come first, Paul says his grooves come first (at least for the vast majority of his writing from the 1980′s onward). He very much writes by feel, coming up with rhythm patterns (frequently with the help of drummers/percussionists) that inspire chords that inspire structure, and then once he has a complete rhythm bed, then he begins to add lyrics, based on the inspiration of the groove. In fact, the Graceland album was the first time he developed this methodology to write his songs.

Quoting Paul himself:

The track would start with the drums, and the drums would imply a key, then we’d go to the guitar, compose a structure, and then I would improvise melodies hundreds and hundreds of times until I found a melody I liked. Words would sometimes come with the melody, sometimes they wouldn’t come for a long time. I have a book of images and phrases, lines that I keep. If there was a line that fit somewhere musically, I’d connect it up to whatever the story was, or begin the story with that line, almost like a skin graft. And that way, the song forms. It’s not preconceived. It’s much more me following the trail of the sound on the track and what my subconscious is stimulated to erupt.

I’m particularly interested in how Paul assembles his lyrics, which frequently feel like a stream-of-consciousness torrent of words that somehow glue together to form a greater meaning. Here’s what he said in a 1990 Songtalk interview with Paul Zollo:

Q: Does your best work come from active, conscious thinking about what a song should say?

A: No…not in my writing in recent years. I don’t consciously think about what a song should say. In fact, I consciously try *not* to think about what a song should say.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I’m interested in what…I find, as opposed to…what I’m planting. I like to be the audience too. I like to discover what it is that’s interesting to me. I like to discover it rather than plot it out. So I let the songs go this way and that way…and basically what I do is be the editor: “Oh that’s interesting. Never mind that, that’s not so interesting…that’s a good line.”

And the most that I can do is say, “There’s a good line,” and the rhyming pattern, I don’t know, let me see how I will set up that line. And that’s the most I’ll do. To construct the first half of a thought that’s the set-up to the second half.

A lot of time, the whole thought comes. Not connected to the thought before it in any appreciable way. And then you say, “Well, what will this connection be?” And by the time you get your choice of the third thought, you’re off in a direction. Because three consecutive thoughts imply direction. They don’t necessarily imply meaning. But they imply direction. And I think direction is sufficient…

So the first impression is that the sound of something is nice. You don’t have to think about what it means at all…and that’s really the way I write. Where there are a lot of different meanings that are available.

“A Boy In The Bubble” begins with an infectious accordion riff that sets up the catchy shuffle rhythm, and right from the get-go, we’re bombarded with a ticker tape of news setting the scene:

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

Paul’s vocal is typical of his later style: it’s unremarkable. He doesn’t inject a lot of emotion. He sings almost the straight speech as if he’s reading from a teleprompter, set to musical notes. With the remarkable quantity of words he flies through, he lets the words tell the story, and his speech accompanies the groove by finding the natural rhythms of the text.

What is the song about? No one knows. Even Paul himself doesn’t let on that it’s about any specific topic. To him, it’s a collection of phrases that were born from what the music inspired. The internet is full of fan speculation (some of it quite insistent) that it’s about advances in technology (it certainly is, to a point), or about Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID), or a medical case in 1984 about a baby that received a heart transplant from a baboon. Some find it uplifting, others find it depressingly cynical. I think Paul intentionally leaves the ambiguity there to let us interpret it as we feel. If he has a more specific inspiration, he doesn’t talk about it, preferring to let the art speak for itself.

Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice of “The Boy in the Bubble”:

Simon sets up every resonance. Here, the African images — lasers in the jungle, a deathly desert wind, a baby with the baboon heart — are no way merely South African, because this is a song about “the way we look to us all.” Here the terrorist hides his bomb in a baby carriage and wires it to a radio in a world run by “a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires”; here a boy wants to live so much he seals himself off from that world in a plastic bubble. You can hardly tell the horrors from the miracles, they’re everywhere, and for a climax we have the rhetorical “and I believe” that precedes Simon’s final repetition of the long refrain…It sounds like real faith to me, and it cements our connection to all this ironic joy-amid-pain. Simon has done the near impossible — brought off a song about the human condition. Looking for “a shot of redemption,” he escapes his alienation without denying its continuing truth.

One final thought on this song, this one phrased as songwriting advice from Jimmy Webb’s brilliant book, Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting:

Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” is a surreal, chain-of-consciousness epic that fires idea after idea at us machine-gun style so that in the end the effect is almost pointillist. Cumulatively it is not unlike being bowled over by a tsunami. However, years earlier Simon wrote the gorgeous standard “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which begins simply, “When you’re weary…” and ends “like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind.” Amateur songwriters should learn the art of clarity before attempting a pell-mell dash in Mr. Simon’s adventurous footsteps.

What stands out most to you about “The Boy In The Bubble”? Add your insight in the comments section below.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, and don’t already have it, support the artist by buying the album (iTunes/Amazon) or single (iTunes/Amazon).

Check out these related projects:

   Songblog: Al Jarreau / Mornin’

   Songblog: Peter Gabriel / In Your Eyes

   Ginny Owens: The Sessions for Get In, I’m Driving

Finally Free is a perky playful song that came out of a germ of a riff idea I had a while ago (which eventually became the intro to the song). Once we got into the songwriting process, it quickly blossomed in all kinds of fun directions. The rhythm and riff of the intro dictated the flow of the rest of the song, and Andrea came up with a wonderfully sunny lyric concept to complement the oom-pah groove. The final mix of this song is full of quirky orchestral ear candy played by clarinet, bassoon, pizzicato cello, oboe, flute, harp, glockenspiel, and timpani, as well as an upright piano and accordion and some vocal layering. During the production process, I recalled the Disney movie Enchanted (one of my favorite Disney movies, with a stellar score and songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz) and that Central Park scene where “That’s How You Know” takes place. I’m “enchanted” by multiple melodies — in addition to the main vocal, there’s a dozen or so related melodic/rhythmic themes that go weaving in and out of the song at various times, both instrumentally and vocally.

I highly recommend checking out Andrea’s other work, including her most recent album, Slow Miracle. She has a wonderful flavor of hopeful pop across her albums.

Stream the entire song below, and buy it on iTunes or Amazon!

I hear a heartbeat
It’s in the air with the butterflies
In fields of honey
With buzzing bees twirling in the sky

My ray of sunshine
You tell a story so shiny I believe
Float on the water
My sparkly laughter makes marionettes upon the sea

Shine your light above me now
Dance me on the skyline
Sweep me up to touch my dreams
High up where I’m finally free

Now stars are smiling
And all the air’s singing lullabies
Our floating lanterns
Like fairy tales flying right before our eyes

Words and Music by David Das and Andrea Hamilton
©2011 Das Bunk Music (BMI) / Andrea Hamilton Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved.

Check out these related projects:

   A song on Virtue’s new album, Free

   Producing the new Shunna Jones project

   Writing and Producing Amy Krebs’s New Single

I’ve been involved in a cappella for more than two decades now. I got heavily involved in a cappella arranging during my high school years, before the college a cappella mass explosion, when there was barely any pop a cappella around except for Bobby McFerrin and Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.” I cut my teeth transcribing charts by Mark Kibble, Mervyn Warren, and Cedric Dent (of Take 6, one of my all-time favorites) and Gene Puerling (of the Singers Unlimited), performed and recorded a lot of vocal jazz in college (with the University of North Texas Jazz Singers), and have retained a love for the genre ever since. Earlier this year I got to work for the hit NBC a cappella competition The Sing-Off (see details on those projects here and here).

Here’s a clip of the song:

This Christmas arrangement, more pop than jazz, began life as a strict 4-part SSAA arrangement, but once we got into the nuts and bolts of the arrangement, it quickly expanded beyond that. Brit and Brey are great vocalists, and we chose to meticulously double-track each of the background parts. Because they are sisters, their blend is exceptional and natural. After all of the backgrounds were recorded, we attacked the lead vocals and ad libs. After twelve hours of work (done across three separate sessions), the recording sessions wrapped and the song was ready for mixing.

For the technically curious, the vocals were recorded through an MXL V69 tube mic and an Audio-Technica AT4050, going through a Metric Halo ULN-2 mic preamp and converter. Brit and Brey recorded each part together, so there’s a thickness to the background parts. Everything was recorded dry, without reverb or compression, then later I used Universal Audio’s LA-2A and 1176 to even out the parts. Each part was panned away from center, but randomly, so that both Brit and Brey’s vocals are evenly spread across the stereo field. Two separate reverbs were used to add depth: a plate reverb and a convolution hall reverb. Then quite a bit of volume automation became necessary to get the song to play smoothly and let the parts go in and out of each other and receive the necessary focus. Finally, to add a bit of analog warmth and bake the layers together, I ran the entire mix through the Universal Audio Studer A800 which adds some tape saturation.

The song was released today and is available for purchase on iTunes!

Check out these related projects:

   A (somewhat) a cappella Sony Ericsson commercial

   Aaron Lazar: Caruso

   String Arranging and MD’ing with Troy MacCubbin

Darklight was created expressly for the demanding world of motion pictures, gaming, and promotional campaigns. It’s geared towards high drama, action, horror, fantasy, and suspense. It combines the world of dramatic orchestral writing that I specialize in with the edgy rock and metal guitar styles that Michael is so comfortable with. The result is sixteen hybrid orchestral rock roller coaster ride trailers filled with tension, suspense, climaxes, drop-offs, impacts, and driving grooves.

Darklight is available on both iTunes, Amazon, and CDBaby as an album containing all sixteen trailers plus alternate mixes of each, and a larger collection is available to trailer editors and other video professionals working in the industry by filling out SonicTremor’s Request page. The larger edition contains the same sixteen trailers and alternate mixes, but at higher resolution (48KHz 24-bit) and with more than a hundred separated elements, including drum hits, orchestra hits, drones, drum beds, risers, and more. Our intent is to provide every possible individual element that a trailer editor could ever need when working on a trailer. Each trailer can be licensed for use directly from SonicTremor.

Have a listen to each trailer below, buy it at iTunes if you like it, but best of all, let me know if you have any friends who are editors who might enjoy working with the material!

Check out these related projects:

   Angels and Demons trailer

   A Woman in Berlin spec trailer

   New collection of movie trailer soundtracks now available