After belting out last weeks song, I was intending to do something pretty chill this week without vocals and guitars... oops...

This one has a more uncertain history than most of my material, but I know the music was definitely written pre-2010, because I recorded a really bad instrumental demo of it on my trusty BOSS BR-900CD (which I sold in 2010). And by bad, I mean three guitar tracks (no vocals, no drums) with no panning, no mixing, and a 'bass' track that was actually a pitch-shifted guitar, all using the built-in effect presets that marginally resembled how I wanted it to sound. I think I perhaps I played to a click, but there are a couple of rough spots (although that was probably just me not locking in). My recording chops were still just shy of non-existent at the time, and the BOSS was not the instant hitmaker I expected it to be, mostly because I could not make friends with trying to produce multi track recordings with that tiny LCD screen and a clunky interface.

The only slightly interesting thing the original demo had was a 'reversed' guitar bit where I actually tried to reverse arpeggiate the verse parts so that when the audio was reversed, it would be in the correct order but have that cool reversed guitar sound. It, uh... didn't quite work how I hoped, which was largely because of my limited gear and abilities at the time (having said that, I didn't attempt to re-do it in this version, rather I opted for some lo-fi strings in place of that idea, attempting to give the vibe of a ye olde patriotic infomercial recruiting soldiers).

Aaaaanyhoo, the song quickly faded into obscurity, because I recall it having a pretty short gap between writing and recording, and having such a short tenure in the brain meant less time to burn in. Which is ironic, because as a procrastinator, recording something soon after writing it suggests I saw potential in the idea at the time. The caveat of this though; to my brain, recorded = I can now free up that mental space.

I have skimmed past the demo a few times while trying to find inspiration through the last few years of Weekly Beats, but it didn't really grab me, largely because of that short tenure, it hadn't earned a yearning within me to complete it. I had also forgotten that I had written lyric and melody ideas at some point through the 2010s, and therefore forgot how semi-complete it was. As I came across it this week, I randomly decided to be less dismissive and let it play out while humming some melody ideas. Halfway through, the penny dropped; I think I already have lyric and melody ideas for this! So I rummaged through the archive and tracked down the lyrics, which helped me remember the melodies.

The guitar parts are essentially as they were in the original demo, just performed and produced notably tidier and clearer, and although the song is now improved in every way over the original, I continue to feel underwhelmed by what I'm producing this year, which is probably just the age having less youthful exuberance available (which I am clearly having a bit of trouble accepting). It's a very safe composition, no edgy choices, no wow and wonderment, just another formulaic pop rock song. But! Along with a few other songs from this year so far, it is another terrible old demo revisited to capture a better representation of what I thought it could have been 'back in the day'.

Funny story; I bought the BR-900CD around 2002 and used it intermittently over the years for very average demos and ideas because I didn't really know how to use it particularly well. I then decided to sell it in 2010, listing the ad before I went to study at TAFE one day, and before the end of the day I had someone coming around to pick it up. One problem; I hadn't transferred any of my material off it yet, because I figured I had a few days before anyone would be interested. Panik! I rushed home after TAFE and began transferring as many bits as I could into Audacity via audio cable in real time (none of that fancy USB transfer tomfoolery). When the person showed up, I had them waiting another 20-30 minutes while I continued before performing a drive wipe. Some were full song ideas, some were half done, some were literally just enough to remind me to rebuild later (eg, first and second riff then faded out). I didn't get it all, but I think I got what I considered half decent.

So, the moral of that story is if you want something to sell quickly, make sure you're completely unprepared for it to sell quickly

Tags: week 22 2026, View by:JaiClone