July | 2025 | Gray Summers

The Whole is beautiful. The part? Equally considered as beautiful too.

EACH SONG. CHOICES AS TO WHAT TO INCLUDE GUITAR WISE. THANKFULLY ONLY SIX CHOICES. OH! FORGOT THE BASS GUITAR….

Fender Jazz Bass guitar and the infamous Tip-Top Hat. 🎩

When you begin a song, it eventually gets under your skin. You do not want it to. But it does. At first though, you just think it will take a few minor add ons, followed by a few vocals. A few takes and Bob’s your Uncle. ‘Ooh…nice’ you say. Recording little additional add ons to complete the satisfying outcome should be a doddle. You finish the bit by bit parts and ‘Save’ on GarageBand. Then email them to yourself……24 times with little changes in each one.

That’s when the frown is ever present in a first, second, third, to fifteenth and onwards…and back to the song first trialed basics to follow ups. There are bits in each that let the side down. Or…give hope.

Here below are 9 versions from a total of 24 sent to email. There are always a mass of emails to myself to cross fingers and find my happy place. However, I didn’t find happiness on each receiving email with this one song. Scenario? Listen on the really high quality Apple Mac M2 recording system through decent Beyerdynamic headphones. After finalising each of the tweaks on GarageBand on each perceived improvement part, email them in basic quality form (due to upload need for WordPress acceptance) and click ‘Send’. Listen on the iPad downstairs through inferior headphones to my lovely ones upstairs and go….’What the heck! That’s a completely different quality to the originals on the Mac M2 recording system’. So it becomes make and do.

As a technophobe and in no way either a sound engineer or producer of skill, it is just a case of shrugging the shoulders and accepting these songs I am working on as the best I can get currently.

You’ll see how one song can provide a sharp learning curve though. So with my newer songs, I suppose the lessons learned up to now will be great experiences for avoiding mistakes.

‘Stop this Heartache’ is the finished song title. Started out as ‘Crashed Out’. I hope these examples below can help to show how I develop a song.

Basic. Acoustic guitar,drums and initial keyboard tune.

Add an overlay of 2nd keyboard. Long filler musical notes.

Keyboard changed to a xylophone vibe. Not good!

Reverted back to original keyboard sound. Add small electric guitar riff.

Brighten up Master track to add punch.

Trial vocal tune. Sung with low exploratory vibe.

Vocal sung with a bit more conviction. The first part only to check if okay.

Master track altered for more punch. Vocals acceptable so kept and the whole song now sung. Harmonies unsure, so tried something a little different below.