"The Truth." (all made with Ardour on Linux)
Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:21 am
This is my last song. Harmonically it's very simple so I thought it was ok to try to make a demo on a PC. This is how I made it:
- Wrote it on my guitar (just chords + voice)
- Put the chords on JjazzLab and tried a lot of different solutions
- Exported MIDI to Ardour 6.2 (compiled by myself ^_^)
- Changed a lot of MIDI stuff: added bass variations, modified a lot of octaves, modified some note velocity, tried a lot of different instruments, added tempo ramps for the ending. I used only one non free-as-in-freedom VST for the bass, all the rest is FOSS.
- In the meanwhile, I wrote the lyrics. I noticed I had to find some rhymes between words with the accent on the last third syllable. There are not so many words like those in English so I liked to find some of them, using the ones I thought to sound well (e.g. "mutable / indisputable"). From those rhymes I ended to find a meaning to the song and so I built the other verses
- Recorded my voice (just one take, lot of small mistakes, bad voice, but I thought it was ok like this in order to make it sound more natural)
- Splitted pad in two different instruments, one for the verse and one for the chorus. Verse became a Synth Cello from GM Fluidsynth, chorus became a nice and trance pad from ZynAddSubFX
- Added effects (chorus for guitars, reverb mostly everywhere, eq, flanger on Zyn, compression and eq on voice, etc.)
- Added a muted track with only MIDI beats, connected to a sidechain compressor put on Zyn pad
- Recorded my own electric guitar with some Zoom effects for the final solo
- Exported in wav
- Loaded wav into Audacity and added loudness normalization to -14dB (YouTube standard) then applied a soft limiter to -1dB
- Made a small video with Ardour playing the song (but the audio comes from the modified wav)
- Loaded on YouTube with Creative Commons license.
And that's the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijSCTz3zhrc
(sooner or later I'll upload all on Soundcloud but I need time to reorganize my old demos)
Hope you like it, keeping in mind I'm not expert in any kind of music arrangement, I'm just a Linux user who sometimes likes to write some songs on his guitar English is not my mother language (I'm Italian) so please pardon me for the inevitable small mistakes and bad pronunciation.
I'd like to know what you think about this song, critic or bad reviews included (they help me to improve myself).
The Lyrics:
The Truth.
(lyrics and music by Stefano Droghetti, 2020, © Creative Commons BY-NC)
Truth may break your dreams, it’s indisputable
may lead you to relive a heinous youth
Always unrevealed, dim and mutable
naked, lost and bare, it’s just the truth
Living in your lie was so beautiful
telling which is which and who is who
with all those you deceived you’ve been so merciful
but then again appeared the awful truth
Hey, can you feel the adrenaline?
please don’t mess with your medicine
it’s twisting your face
And wait, are you feeling delusional?
your own life is material and now it points at you
Hidden in the dark all those minions
crawling in the dirt for just a quid
they have been designed with rack and pinion
looking for the sign, they never stop
Some day in the woods you’ll see the orioles
gliding in the wind they’ll sing at you
and then you’ll recognize the secondary role
you had in all the stats they call the truth
Hey, can you feel the adrenaline?
please don’t mess with your medicine
it’s twirling your brain
And wait, are you feeling delusional?
your life is material and now it points at you
oh, it’s pointing at you
- Wrote it on my guitar (just chords + voice)
- Put the chords on JjazzLab and tried a lot of different solutions
- Exported MIDI to Ardour 6.2 (compiled by myself ^_^)
- Changed a lot of MIDI stuff: added bass variations, modified a lot of octaves, modified some note velocity, tried a lot of different instruments, added tempo ramps for the ending. I used only one non free-as-in-freedom VST for the bass, all the rest is FOSS.
- In the meanwhile, I wrote the lyrics. I noticed I had to find some rhymes between words with the accent on the last third syllable. There are not so many words like those in English so I liked to find some of them, using the ones I thought to sound well (e.g. "mutable / indisputable"). From those rhymes I ended to find a meaning to the song and so I built the other verses
- Recorded my voice (just one take, lot of small mistakes, bad voice, but I thought it was ok like this in order to make it sound more natural)
- Splitted pad in two different instruments, one for the verse and one for the chorus. Verse became a Synth Cello from GM Fluidsynth, chorus became a nice and trance pad from ZynAddSubFX
- Added effects (chorus for guitars, reverb mostly everywhere, eq, flanger on Zyn, compression and eq on voice, etc.)
- Added a muted track with only MIDI beats, connected to a sidechain compressor put on Zyn pad
- Recorded my own electric guitar with some Zoom effects for the final solo
- Exported in wav
- Loaded wav into Audacity and added loudness normalization to -14dB (YouTube standard) then applied a soft limiter to -1dB
- Made a small video with Ardour playing the song (but the audio comes from the modified wav)
- Loaded on YouTube with Creative Commons license.
And that's the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijSCTz3zhrc
(sooner or later I'll upload all on Soundcloud but I need time to reorganize my old demos)
Hope you like it, keeping in mind I'm not expert in any kind of music arrangement, I'm just a Linux user who sometimes likes to write some songs on his guitar English is not my mother language (I'm Italian) so please pardon me for the inevitable small mistakes and bad pronunciation.
I'd like to know what you think about this song, critic or bad reviews included (they help me to improve myself).
The Lyrics:
The Truth.
(lyrics and music by Stefano Droghetti, 2020, © Creative Commons BY-NC)
Truth may break your dreams, it’s indisputable
may lead you to relive a heinous youth
Always unrevealed, dim and mutable
naked, lost and bare, it’s just the truth
Living in your lie was so beautiful
telling which is which and who is who
with all those you deceived you’ve been so merciful
but then again appeared the awful truth
Hey, can you feel the adrenaline?
please don’t mess with your medicine
it’s twisting your face
And wait, are you feeling delusional?
your own life is material and now it points at you
Hidden in the dark all those minions
crawling in the dirt for just a quid
they have been designed with rack and pinion
looking for the sign, they never stop
Some day in the woods you’ll see the orioles
gliding in the wind they’ll sing at you
and then you’ll recognize the secondary role
you had in all the stats they call the truth
Hey, can you feel the adrenaline?
please don’t mess with your medicine
it’s twirling your brain
And wait, are you feeling delusional?
your life is material and now it points at you
oh, it’s pointing at you