It often seems to me, from the other years I’ve done FAWM, that by around song 6, I’ve hit my first “flagging moment”, where the tap of inspiration isn’t quite flowing as readily as it was, and I need to take a moment to recover myself…
...well, I could use that excuse, and there’s some truth to it, but basically this weekend was exceptionally busy (and we had some visitors at home), so there was precious little time available to come up with ideas, let alone record them. Hence song 6 here being (a) a day “behind schedule”, and (b) arguably a bit on the underdeveloped side.
Surprisingly, I haven’t wheeled out either of my acoustic guitars so far this FAWM (for practical reasons, mostly), but I wanted to include at least one in this song, so I ran through a chord progression on my Seagull S12 12-string, recording it into Music Memos on my iPhone 6S (via the Sonic Port VX).
I make a point when doing FAWM, of not casting negative aspersions on my demos, but I feel I should forewarn you this time, that this one sounds rather “ragged”. MM usually does a reasonable job of building a bass/drums accompaniment, but here it seemed to struggle. (I wondered if the 12-string’s extra harmonics might cause problems for MM, but that’ll take extra investigation!)
The bass part MM generated was unusable, but the drum track, despite losing track of the beat somewhat, achieved an “interesting” effect, so I moved the project into Garageband. From there, I re-recorded the bass (via my Ministar Testar electric guitar through the MIDI Guitar 2 app) and added an electric guitar part. The vocal came two days later, recorded via the phone mic (and the MicSwap Pro app) in a brief available moment!
Mixed a bit hurriedly in Logic on our Mac - I’d call this a work in progress, but aren’t most FAWM songs?
lyrics
The horses race and the dice will fall
And somehow I must make sense of it all
Look for the joker and find the ace
To save my face
Spin the wheel and turn the card
Makes no difference if you try hard
If a chance is all you take
Just one mistake
Meet the future as it goes
Around the corner, no-one knows
No need to gamble on what’s to come
Just set your face and run
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