My Newest Recording – You Don’t Have To Be
April 14th, 2011 . by Alexander Fisher
I had been playing a lot of keyboards on my recordings lately. A piano is a great instrument to ferret out a pretty melody in a new song. But I was ready for a change back to loud.
Last year, my cousin, Matt Henderson, from East Lansing, Michigan had asked me to help out on a recording he was doing. He sent me a demo of “You Don’t Have To Be”. I was immediately struck by the beauty of the song, especially with Matt’s excellent vocal and piano tracks. Unfortunately I had just broken my ankle and no matter how much I wanted to help, I just couldn’t get it together.
Recently, I decided that I wanted to record my arrangement of “You Don’t Have To Be”. From the beginning I heard the song with a full electric sound chugging along in the background with screaming leads over the top. Matt’s arrangement was very beautiful, but I needed over-driven guitars, thumping bass, and crashing cymbals. I recorded it nearly the way I heard it in my head all along.
“You Don’t Have To Be”
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Matt finished his version of the song and uploaded it to Facebook. You can hear it at Matt Henderson’s Facebook music page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Matt-Henderson/357286361522
After hearing Matt’s completed recording of “You Don’t Have To Be”, it inspired me to write and record “The Wavelength”, one of my favorite songs that I’ve written.
Hear “The Wavelength” at:
http://www.linearcanvas.com/?p=1148
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The song was written by Matt Henderson. I am responsible for the arrangement. I performed all the musical and vocal parts. I used a Shure SM-58 microphone to record all the vocals. I played my Fender Stratocaster electric guitar on the recording using my Line 6 Pod 2.0 as a direct box. I played bass guitar on my Rickenbacker 4001. The drums are a combination of MIDI patches and a Roland Octapad drum pad using Session Drummer 3.
I recorded, mixed, and mastered this song on my desktop computer using a PreSonus Firebox audio interface, with Cakewalk Sonar v8.5 Producer and Sony Sound Forge v9 software. The master is recorded at 24 bit at 44.1 kHz resolution.
