Another song of yesteryear... I did a demo for this in Pro Tools around 8 years ago and thought I did alright at the time, but since starting with Studio One in 2020 for my first Weekly Beats outing, that demo has been at the back of my mind for how lackluster and 'toothless' it now seems.

The general composition is similar to the demo with a few revisions, particularly some lyric tidy up, because there were literally two lines I ad-lib'd nonsense in the original and were just left there because I couldn't think of anything better, and some other lines that were either too repetitive or needed a bit more coherence.

Production and performance-wise is the most notable lift over the demo, giving the vocals more oomph and using a better collection of plugins to give it an audio overhaul using my slightly better understanding of mixing. Another thing that always bugged me about the demo is that I didn't properly understand delay fractions and such, so even though the 'dotted 8th' intro is how I intended it to be (I wrote it with an analogue delay pedal), the demo riff only has an 8th note delay, because I couldn't figure out the Pro Tools delay plugin to sound like the pedal. Such a noob...

One reason this one took so long to revisit is through my laziness, I intended to reinstall Pro Tools at some point and transfer over whatever elements I could recover from the original demo to Studio One so I wasn't starting from scratch. I eventually reinstalled last year, and........ I couldn't find the project anywhere... So, I dragged the MP3 of the demo into Studio One and used that as a base to rebuild a new project over, and here we are. I'm glad though, it was more work to start again, but better for it.

Another reason; I've been having doubts of my vocal and guitar strength the last couple of years as the age progresses further away from youth (and also because I never practice). I remember the chorus vocals being a bit challenging 8 years ago for the original demo, so that's been a hurdle in my head, and I remember getting crazy sore fingers from all the takes. Thankfully though, I managed the vocals and guitars fine, and even felt less sore in the throat and fingers afterwards, even though these vocals have notably more oomph than the original. Yay!

Bonus trivia:
The riff under the solo is possibly the oldest remnant of my early days of guitar that has made it into any proper songs of mine. I believe I landed on that one when I was around 14 years old, because I remember jamming with a childhood friend of mine I was visiting in my home town after having moved away when I was 12, and we had both discovered guitar while separate. He was very into grunge (because early 90s) and he was throwing down random 'Cobain/Vedder' style vocal ideas over my random riffs because I hadn't even considered singing yet. We were recording to a cassette at the time, but that disappeared years ago. I can still recall the melody he did over that riff because I liked it. When I was writing this song around 2018, it was kind've by accident that this riff became part of it, but it seemed more like a solo moment than a vocal moment, and even though there is probably 0.00000000001% chance that he would even recall an improv melody he did over 30 years ago, it felt a bit icky to use it without asking him.

Tags: week 21 2026, View by:JaiClone