MUSIC

ANATOMY OF A SONG

Here we’ll take you on a little journey through how a song comes together. Most people probably don’t know much about the process of writing and recording a song, so we hope you enjoy this feature.

The song we’ve chosen is called Flight Of Fancy. We won’t tell you at this stage what it’s about, because Hand Elephant Records will bring you a competition later to guess what it’s about. Debbie wrote this song in 2007 and in the Blog section, you can read a little about how she writes songs.

Here is the first version of the song. This is a section, about a minute-and-a-half long, and we’ll update later versions from about the same point in the song. This first version is what we call a Pre-Production version. In fact, it was recorded in Hand Elephant Records Tower, not in a professional studio. It features Debbie playing an acoustic guitar and singing the main vocals, with a second vocal over-dubbed in a place or two. It’s quite early in the life of the song and was only recorded to enable other musicians to hear it and learn it, and to get some ideas recorded so that the song could develop along its life. It sounds very crude when compared to later versions. Have a listen!

Now listen to the second version. Debbie is still singing (just one vocal this time) and playing her guitar (an electric guitar now), but now Jester and Bryce are playing on the song too, and it’s been recorded in a professional studio. The first thing you’ll notice is how much faster the song has become. Debbie’s vocal and guitar were only rough – they’re called guide vocal and guide guitar – just to keep the band together while they were recording. The vocal and guitar will go eventually and be replaced by better versions, where Debbie can concentrate on just her playing and singing. Bryce’s bass playing is great on this song, but he makes a couple of mistakes in this section. Maybe you can’t hear them, but they’re there. Later, he’ll correct them and we’ll tell you how he does that later on. Have a listen and see if you even recognise it as the same song!

Now here’s the third version. Debbie has re-done her vocal more or less properly, although if you listen, you can hear her sing a little bit out of tune on the “Oooh”s in the quiet bit, because she didn’t want that sound for that part, so she wasn’t concentrating! Later, there will be lots of vocal on that part. Bryce hasn’t corrected his mistakes on this version yet either and if you listen closely towards the end, you can hear Debbie singing the riff as the guitar solo starts, because she was just getting so carried away by it all in the studio! All these mistakes will eventually be cleaned up in the mixing stage in the studio, which we’ll tell you all about later. There are a million (well, okay, several) different guitars on this version, but it’s still a very long way from finished, missing a guitar still, all the backing vocals and the keyboards. We think it’s very different from the second version, more rocking, but have a listen and see if you agree!