JustDave

Firstly apologies for the gap between my last blog entry and this one, it’s been far too long. Writing these things is not something that comes particularly naturally to me as I (stupidly) tend just to assume that everyone already knows what I am up to so there is no need to tell anybody (which of course you don’t, if I don’t write a blog).

I left it back in mid March questioning whether an original artist doing some cover songs for a different angle on exposure was a good idea. Well I now have four cover songs with videos on the JustDave YouTube Channel to go with my one original song video, and I can safely say that they haven’t exactly set the world alight……. yet. This may just be because none of the videos show me impaling myself on a BMX bike while doing a triple back flip with a half turn over a bus, or show my dog skateboarding and doing a paw stand while eating ravioli through a straw etc, etc.

Seriously though, the first cover video went on YouTube in early April and the latest in early June and after a good few initial hits each one had just a trickle of views until the last week or so when all of them are being watched much more regularly now and the view count for all of them is increasing steadily.

I originally had around fourteen songs to choose from for the videos and I eventually recorded six of them. Of those six, I only used four as I wasn’t as happy as I felt I should have been with the final song feel on the other two. Three are acoustic with me just playing either acoustic guitar or keyboards and singing but the ,fourth was a late addition and is a full production with a guest vocalist.

The first three were good fun and served their purpose as the basis for a video as intended but it is the fourth song which has proved to be invaluable to me.

I was asked if I could play and produce a cover song for a friend of mine, Lauren Salter, to sing to. It sounded like a good project so I agreed. She chose Avril Lavigne’s ‘My Happy Ending’ which I learned, played and recorded as faithfully as I could manage.

What has proved so valuable to me is that this is the first time I have ever had reason to carefully study and try to reproduce someone else’s production, much less an artist with massive resources behind them.

After listening to the original track numerous times you can start to hear loads of additional tracks they have used to support the sounds that are the basis of the track. I am probably way short of what actually was recorded in their studio but even with my resources I have three different electric guitar tracks, two different acoustic guitar tracks, three different keyboard tracks over and above the standard array of guitar, bass, keyboard and drum tracks which you use to form the basis of the song you believe you are hearing when you hear the track on the radio etc.

With the two separate drum kits used and a good few of both Lauren’s and my own vocal tracks, my version as it is has 54 audio tracks (effect and group tracks take this total well over 65 tracks). Having the tracks down is all very well but then getting the individual sounds right and mixing that many tracks on a PC is a formidable task.

What I am really saying is that I would recommend to anyone who records and produces their own material to try this exercise as the educational value of doing this track has been more valuable over a shorter space of time than anything I have done previously.

Obviously I am not saying that in some naive way I believe my version of this song is perfect or a total reproduction of what Avril Lavigne did. It definitely has a lot of my own interpretation (and my mistakes) in it, but the amount I learned about how what you hear on major recordings is achieved and how much of it is not what it originally seems to be is massive.

Take a listen to the track at JustDave Downloads where you can hear it and download it for free and please let me know what you think.

We also did a video for it which is on the JustDave YouTube Channel. Lauren did a great job with both her vocals and the video and is really pleased with the result for both. I’m fairly pleased too.

Its not that I either want to sound like Avril Lavigne or even to necessarily use the sounds like a typical modern commercial recording, but learning the basis of how they make their sounds will inevitably help me to make my own sounds better in future.

You really should try it.

Thanks for reading

-JD-