Cosmic Dog

Backstory

About two years ago I embarked on a journey to do something I’ve wanted to do since I was about six years old: learn how to play the drums. It’s taken me about that long to become comfortable enough with it to try writing some music with live drums.

Listen

Earlier this year, partly inspired by the original Creators’ Club announcement, I joined a songwriting workshop offered by my music school and fired up my old DAW for the first time in about 8 years to try to create some new music. This song is the result, and it’s the first one in which I performed and recorded all of the parts with live instruments.

It’s not perfect, or even complete yet (there are a couple of parts that are intended to have guitar solos, but I’m not super good at soloing). But I’m proud enough of it to share with the world. And as part of the workshop, we’re going to perform it live at a couple of gigs, which will mark the first time I’ll be performing any of my original music in front of an audience. I’m excited and nervous, but mostly excited!

The Process

I started writing the song in late January around the time the Creators’ Club was first announced, and it’s taken me several months to finish writing and record it.

The song

I’m a huge fan of psychedelic rock. More recently I’ve also been very much into doom metal, so I set out to write a song that combined those genres. The subject: my dog Brody. If she were an astronaut and guiding me on a journey through the infinite cosmos, of course.

The Demo

I’m no sound engineer, but I know my way around a DAW enough to record some basic parts. My recording setup and gear are by no means professional—they’re basement recordings at best, literally and in spirit. I use Reaper for recording and mixing. It’s a full-featured, professional-quality app on par with much more expensive apps like ProTools or Logic Pro that’s free to try and only $60 to purchase, so I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning audio production!

Gear

I bought a single Behringer XM8500 mic for about $25 which I used to record every part.

I recorded the guitar parts with a Hagstrom Super Swede through a mic’d Pignose G40V tube amp and a handful of effects pedals. I plan to re-record at least some parts with a used Orange OR15 which I acquired more recently.

The drums were tricky to track with only a single microphone in an untreated basement. I played around with lots of different mic placements, drum heads, cymbals, and dampening techniques. I eventually settled on using my practice Zildjian L80s because they didn’t echo as much as my “real” cymbals, and dampening all of the drums with t-shirts to reduce the echoing as much as possible. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s better than I expected to be able to do with my limited resources.

I don’t currently own a bass amp, so I recorded bass by plugging directly into my audio interface and using an amp modeler to beef up the sound.

Vocals were the easiest thing to record—I just double-tracked every part to hide my mistakes and added some delay effects make things sound spacey. Far out.

Tab

I don’t usually notate music I write, because I very much learn and play by ear, but I happened to write this one out because I’m collaborating with other musicians.

Thanks!

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for following! I’m super happy to have been able to participate in the Creators’ Club and share my work. If all goes well, I’ll have a recording of a live performance in a couple of weeks, so we’ll see how that goes. Wish me luck!