June 27, 2024
Cowboy rock. That’s the term I’ve heard used a couple times now to describe the song I’ve been working on this week, and I’m not hating it lol!
You’d think being a native Arizonan, born and raised, I’d have a lot more songs with that sound haha. In fact, one of the fond memories I have of my late grandfather growing up was discovering him down in his basement binge watching old black and white cowboy movies.🖤
So while I’ve never considered myself a cowboy I def have cowboy in my blood as both my grandpas on both sides of my family grew up as cowboys exploring western terrain on horseback. I do love horseback riding, and I’ve always dreamed of having my own ranch to take care of.. Sarah always rolls her eyes at me when I half jokingly talk about selling all we have to go buy a farm lol.
Anyway this week has been focused on wrapping up the instrumentals on this cowboy rock song “The Reckoning”.
It’s so raw and gritty already, I don’t want to mess too much with that quality by adding too much production sound to it, but I tried disassembling our new drum kit and recording some basic individual tom drum rhythms with some microphones. In a way it kind of adds a Native American drum feel to compliment the westerny vibe already happening. I posted a short video in the Future Sphere Discord to demonstrate the tom drum recording. I attempted this on each of our three tom drums, experimenting with different rhythmic patterns but ultimately stuck to just the one you see in that video. It sounded best too on our 16” floor tom (the lowest one) rather than on the others so I scrapped those ones.
For the second verse I wrote a female vocal part for Rose Read to sing. You may recognize that name from a couple other songs of ours. I talked about growing up with her basically as a fourth sister in my family full of girls in this past Studio Journal entry here. She’s scheduled to come record her part next Saturday. Yes it has taken us THIS long to coordinate a time for her to come in haha! Better late than never, and the wait will have been worth it… She has a very unique quality to her voice that will only add to the ambience. VERY excited.
Besides the additional tom drum sounds, I’ve also been recording small tambourine sounds and still want to add shakers. I also added a bit of what we call “synth glue” in the industry. A simple background synth that isn’t really audibly noticeable unless you’re looking for it.
I have a few more vocal lines of my own to record and double (singing the same melody over myself to thicken up the vocals in a mix) but besides that I think this track will be done VERY soon. You can continue to follow it’s progress here.