As a part of my education, I’m doing a kind of internship at the local music school and teach music to little kids for about two hours every friday. It’s both and challenging, I like it a lot. I also have to do a full time internship for two weeks, and both observe a teacher at the music school and see how they teach, as well as teach a bit myself. I’m half-ways through the second week of this right now. It’s loads of fun, but it really does a number on your brain to do it full time. I normally start working at around 1 or 2 pm and work until about 8 pm every night, and holy crap is my brain tired when I get home. It’s really quite exhausting to work with kids and to stay focused and teach for a full day.  But I like it. It would be awesome if I could find a job as a teacher after I’m done with this course. Part time teaching and part time performing would be about as awesome as it can get.

Rainhat – The first dozen

The files come in a .zip file about 90 Mb in size. You can also download individual songs from my Music page. If you don’t have a program that you can unpack .zip files with, I suggest you google “7-zip”. It’s an open source program that works fine.

If you like it, you can share the music with anyone you like, online or otherwise, but you may not use the music for any kind of commercial purpose without permission from me.

Recording the album took a whole lot longer than I thought because of many things. Since I did everything myself, basically starting from nothing, I had to make sure I had the equipment and instruments I needed, the software to record and edit with, and I had to learn how to use all these things well enough. The whole process was also dependant on other things, like the house being quiet enough for me to record without getting a bunch of noise on the recording as well. This house is not soundproof. It’s just a regular house, so if the other people in the house were watching TV, doing laundry, taking a shower or anything like that, my microphones would pick it up straight through the walls. So progress was a bit slow, but piece by piece I managed to record all of it. I’m pretty happy with the result! Sure, it would probably sound better if the whole thing was done in a professional studio that had all the right equipment and with a bunch of experts behind the controls, but for being an album that I recorded in my basement all on my own, I think the quality is not bad at all. Whether the actual music is any good, I leave for you to decide. So download the album and let me know what you think!

If you feel like supporting me, the album is also available on my Bandcamp page. There you can buy the album and download it in a range of different file formats. You can also use the Paypal button on the right if you want to help me out. You name the price, even if it’s only $2, it helps.

Undecided by Rainhat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

You can download the song for free and share it with anyone you like, but you may not use it for any kind of commercial purpose without my permission.

This song was fun, as it presented a new kind of challenge when I was recording it. During the chorus, there’s a part where the background vocals go “Ooo” in a three part harmony. The two lower ones were fine, but the top one was just a tiny bit above what my voice can actually do. The difficult part appears three times in the song, and I did ten or eleven takes but I just couldn’t hit those high notes in tune three times in a row. I got it somewhat OK once or twice, but I never managed to nail it the third time. But I didn’t want to leave it out, since the harmony didn’t sound as good without it. So what to do?

Some creative editing. I took the one part where I got the part right once and copied the first section where the high notes appear. Then I pasted it into the harmony in the other two sections. Since it’s only a small “ooo” part of the top voice that I couldn’t do, it doesn’t affect the lyrics. So what you actually hear is the exact same clip three times, but you can’t tell unless you’re listening very, very carefully. Then you might notice that the vibrato sounds very similar every time at the very end of the harmony part… I wouldn’t be able to sing that part live. But then again, I wouldn’t be able to sing a three part harmony background with myself anyway, so it’s not a problem. If I perform the full version of this song live, I’ll just have to get a good background singer to do it.

This was a very small and simple edit compared to what goes on when the professionals are producing a song with some famous band. Those two words in the lead vocals didn’t sound good? Do them again, and edit them into the song afterwards. I doubt that there are very many songs out there that aren’t made up of a gazillion short clips edited into a whole that sounds great. A good song can literally be all the best 3 second snippets from dozens and dozens of takes, all glued together.

I had a lot of fun writing and recording this one, at least after I fixed the shockmount that broke. I wanted to write a love song, but realized it’s quite hard to do that without having it sound like a cliché or incredibly cheezy. Everyone always “shines like a sun” and “flies on the wings of love” in love songs, so I figured I would try to use phrases that you don’t hear in love songs that often to make it a bit more interesting.

There are no drums in this song, only bass, guitars and vocals. The acoustic guitar took a while to record, it’s surprisingly tricky to play a fingerpicking style accompaniment completely evenly and with an even tempo. I re-did it several times before I was happy with it. The electric guitar parts were fun too, I pretty much just hit record and improvised until I got something that sounded cool. All in all, I’m pretty happy with this song. 

Now, only two more songs to record for my album!

Rolling over by Rainhat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

The song tells the true story about a car accident I was in when I was younger. We were on our way home from my grandparents’ place early one morning. They live out in the woods and the roads out there are all these really narrow, zigzagging kind of gravel roads. Our driver looked down for just a second to do something with the car radio, but it turned out to be one second too much. When she looked up again, the car was just feet away from the side of the road and the road was turning right. She yanked the wheel, desperately trying to keep us on the road, but this just made the rear end of the car slide out to the left and off the road. The sides of the road fall quite steeply down into deep ditches, so the car started sliding on its undercarriage on the edge of the road. The car then crashed into this huge boulder, mostly buried in the gravel at the side of the road. It wasn’t sticking up out of the ground enough to stop our car, only to catapult the car into the air and make it start tumbling. We flipped over once in the air, landed, then flipped over again, before coming to a stop with the wheels pointing down and with the rear end of the car in the ditch. Miraculously, all three of us in the car survived and sustained only small bruises, but the car looked more like a raisin than a car.

Finishing this song took quite a bit longer than I had hoped, largely because I just couldn’t get a quiet moment for recording the vocals. One of our neighbors started building something in his garden, and at first I thought it was like a small shed or something, but I realized a few days ago that he’s actually building an extension to his house, more than doubling the size of the house. He seems to be an industrious kind of guy, so he’s been hammering away at his house from 9 in the morning until 9 in the evening. On top of this, the neighbor on the other side started adding to his house as well, building a new balcony. So there has been a whole lot of hammering going on. My large condensor microphone is sensitive enough to pick up the hammering quite clearly even through walls and doors, so I haven’t been able to record anything in a while.

So, check out the song and tell me what you think! Until next time…