Category: Music

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An album of my versions of some great cover songs. I had help from several people on this. Most notably, Chrysalynn Calder, Doug Cross, Dave Overland, Darren Garrett and Elizabeth Darcel.

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This is a revamped pumped up version of a previous release, Dream a Life, to be included on the new album The Instrumentalist.

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This song, ‘Shine, Shine’ was written back a few years ago and refined several times. I played all the instruments and programmed the ones I don’t know how to play (horns). I always was proud of the way this song came out. This will be the first cut on my new instrumental album.

Here’s a video that goes with this song.

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I worked on the song, completely revising it with new guitars and bass. It was a blast looking at this old video of our dog Rudy through the years. He’s now 10 and still acts like a pup, albeit a little slower and one tooth less.

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My son helped me set up his video server at home and connect it to use my phone as a camera.

In my back yard, a robin built a nest under my picnic table. I set up the phone to capture the videos that you can see below.

I included my version of Blackbird as the music accompaniment. It wasn’t long enough, so I added in a reversed section in the middle to space it out.

You can see close to the end that one of the robins was none too happy with the phone capturing his actions. He gives it the evil eye and then flies into it.

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This is my version of the song Because from the Beatles Abbey Road album. It is accompanied by some pictures from the Abbey Road sessions. I play the instruments and do some vocal work on this. @kiwichrys helps out on vocals.

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This is from the Private Lightning album released in the early 80s. I play bass on this. The picture is three band members on top of the volcano on the island of Montserrat where we recorded.

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Another Private Lightning song – I’m on bass guitar. The picture is the drum setup in the studio that was used on this song and the rest of the album. Recorded at AIR studios in Montserrat (before it was destroyed by a hurricane).

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Another track from the Private Lightning album. Thriller is cut three. I finally got tired of listening to all of the problems caused in the production of this album. Here is a much better version.

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This is a song that developed from a keyboard pounding session at 3 in the morning when I was in my 20s and fairly inebriated. Fortunately I pressed record on the old cassette player. I found it years later and have been developing it further ever since.

I wanted to make it about a serial killer, how he developed into such. This was based on a book I read back then called By Reason of Insanity. The main character, Thomas Bishop, thought that Caryl Chessman was his real dad because his mom got raped up on lover’s lane.

Anyway, I never got around to writing the lyrics. I tried, but they just wouldn’t come. Maybe I will try again at some time.

But for now, here it is.

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I posted this content onto the Cakewalk blog after I saw a question about it – thought I should make it available to anyone who might be interested.

This demonstrates Cakewalk’s ability to determine a tempo map from an existing track. (It usually does an OK job but most of the time needs edits. It’s a somewhat tedious process but pays off in the long run. Once you get used to it, it goes pretty quickly. So without any further ado, here are the steps I use.

– Get a recording of a song you may like to cover.  mp3,wav,whatever can be imported into Cakewalk. Select a track and do a File->Import.

– Once the track is in Cakewalk, check out the start of the file, cut out anything at the beginning that is before the song actually starts.  In this image I am about to delete the quiet part and move the rest of the track over to the left to the zero position.

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Now if you select the track and hold down the shift key and the left mouse button while dragging up to the topmost bar (it will change color when you have done it), then release, Cakewalk will calculate the tempo map from the file.  It may take a while to complete.  Often it is not perfect.  You can go into the tempo map to edit it as much as you want.  This is the time consuming part, but it is worth it if you want to record and line up other tracks with it.

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Click on Views->Tempo to open up a graphic of the tempo map.  Then you can use the mouse to move the numbers pane to the right and expose the chart.

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You can use the + and – horizontal and vertical magnifying glasses to size the chart appropriately.  Beats per minute is to the left.

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This is where the time consuming part comes in. I turn on the metronome and look at the audio waveform to find out where the major beats are.  Here the audio is slightly after the beat. 

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To correct something like this, you can actually hold the mouse button down and pull the tempo map line down before the cursor.

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Like I say, it takes some time to get it right, but if you do it a few times, you get used to it.  Once you adjust it, you can use all of the midi tools to line things up close to the grid for any other midi tracks you will add, and you can also adjust the audio on any tracks where needed.

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This is my cover of a great Paul Simon song from his 1986 album Graceland. It was the fifth single released. I was completely surprised that I didn’t know (until now) that it was Linda Ronstadt singing the female harmony. On my version, @kiwichrys from Bandlab does the honors.

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I am not sure if this is new in Melodyne or whether Cakewalk now imports more information.

From what I can remember I have never had access to the frequency bar graph except when using Melodyne Studio as a standalone.

This snapshot is of an instance of Melodyne applied to a clip.

You can see the bar graph at the bottom. You can select frequency ranges and boost or lower them. Here I select some high frequencies and anticipate boosting them a little. You can listen to the differences in real time and watch the frequency components bounce up and down.

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Here’s a jazzy metal song, a collab between Plop @backontrack, Steve @steve2k2 and @the_m_project. Plop and @the_m_project shared in the song parts and in solos but he built the melody and @the_m_project mirrored it while I played bass and mastered the mix.