Dany

The song I want to talk about today gives extreme mix feelings. The song title is "Dany" for no real reason other that we felt like calling it "Dany." The reason this song gives me mix feeling is because the whole song was composed, written, edited and mixed in less than 24 hours, this makes incredibly proud, but it always leaves me thinking we could have made this song so much better than what it actually is now. The reason we rushed the song is because that was the first time me and Mario Rivera (aka Marito an amazing musician far better than myself) were given Marito's dad studio for the day, well initially we were giving the studio for only the day we ended up spending the whole night there. Thing is, we were given the studio and we were as excited as a, not to sound too cliche, a child finding their first boner. I packed up my guitar and my laptop went over to pick up Marito and head down to the studio only to realize we really didnt know what the fuck we were about to do. On the way there we were listening to my new Imelda May Album, an artist I have to thank Ceci for showing me, and as we were listening to the 8th track "Smokers' Song" we noticed we liked that bass line with a rockabilly style to it so once we were sitting down on the studio with no idea on what to do we came up with the bass line that you hear right after the intro of the song. Which now that I've told were the idea actually comes from if you listen to the song you can do nothing but say "wow that sounds like a pretty cheap imitation" and I might even agree with you to a certain level. At this point we had a far to basic idea of what we wanted to do and time was limited so we started recording.
Marito being a jazz musician came up with the intro to the song which has a strong jazz feel to it with a few soft guitar licks on top of it, the intro is my personal favorite part of the song. Right after a few attempts we got that part down and we jumped straight to that first bass lick we came up with, except of course we didn't have an actual bass so all the bass parts were recorded with Marito's keyboard. we decided it sounded to empty so we decided to put a guitar part following the same notes as the bass except that I decided that it might be a good idea to have them slightly out of phase, looking back at that decision I'm almost sure it wasn't the best I now feel it feels more messy than creative. We later came up with the chord progression for the chorus which was first recorded in the piano and then we added a very dirty distorted guitar on top. Right after this we noticed the change was to agressive so we added a pre-chorus. at this point we figured out the structure of the song and finished recording what would be the backing track, except we didn't have drums in the studio so it was purely the keyboard and guitar.
After finishing that we took a quick drive to a near by Burger King and had a fast dinner, we entered the studio at 4pm it was now midnight and we hadn't eaten anything. Once dinner was over we started on what we both consider our weakest part: writing lyrics and settling on a melody. We started with the melody, we started playing the verse part of the song over and over while we where each in a different part of the studio humming different melodies that could fit the backing track. This whole humming thing was very frustrating, every time I thought I had something good I would quickly forget it or when I thought I definitively had it after showing to Marito it sounded horrible. after a few hours we came up with what would be the melody for the song, and now it was time for the lyrics. I dont really know what it is with lyrics but in a way they always make me uncomfortable its now really the fact that I dont like people reading what I write, which I usually dont, but its more of a "I'm not sure this makes sense" sort of feeling. we started writing and re-writing for a few hours till we found a first verse and a chorus. Marito started taking takes and takes and recording almost became frustrating, I'm glad Marito is as picky and dedicated to what he records as he is, but after 13 hours of recording it can get very exhausting.
Slowly but confident we finished recording the voice and started on working in the solos, for both of us this came more naturally. at about 6:30 am we left the studio.
Walking outside was a huge shock, I knew how late it was but since there were no windows on the studio having the sun just slap you in the face was, well, shocking,
I dropped Marito off, fought with the traffic because it was the morning rush hour I got home at about 7:30, slept for 6 hours woke up had lunch picked up Marito and headed back to my house to record the drums. As we listened to the song to put a drum track to it we found so many mistakes that at this point we just couldn't fix we had to work around them. The most curious one was the one at about 3:40 at which for some reason was some extra time between the pre-chorus and chorus, we just made the best of it and added a small "drum solo?" thing, I really liked how that sounded. One more thing I should mention about the drums and you might have noticed already is that I had no crash cymbal, my drumkit is as cheap as it gets and you can tell by that distinctive "this drum sounds worse than a bucket and branches" sound and at that moment I didn't even had the crash, oh well something else to work around. After that I edited and mixed which I admit is not my best work but here it is:
Dany by Electric Axis

I ask only that when you listen that you do so with good headphones or speakers, mainly because when I showed this to my dad I did so in a car with a shitty sound system and the song sounded so empty and bad I was incredibly embarrases when he heard it, even after I told him it only took a day to do. Anywho  I hope you enjoy it and feel free to leave any comments or rants about it.