It seemed like it was meant to be. I was on the bus on my way to my day job, thinking for some reason that I felt like writing a song. Yes, even though I had said I wouldn’t write anything new until the “Summer’s End” EP was out the door. And I thought, what’s on my mind? Besides sex of course. Always of course. Well, I’ve been watching way too much baseball over the last couple months — you know, since JUNE — and I wanted to see if I could write a rally type sports song. So I did. I wrote a few lines, then a chorus, then some more lines… And I twisted it just enough, as I like to do, so that it works on more than one level. Always of course.
Then I saw the email saying that 2K Sports was looking for a song for the 2K11 Baseball game. Deadline: October 15.
Quickly I went to line up the lyrics with my library of orphaned recordings and felt like I had a match, a killer riff that I was saving for a special occasion. And Wednesday the 12th I went to work.
Warning: method spoilers ahead!
I picked 130 BPM as a good tempo for an upbeat song — a little faster than my usual — and instead of a boring click set a thumping kick sample to work. Since I nearly always have the lyric melody in mind when I put the words down, I recorded the vocals FIRST. Then I worked with the prerecorded riff, first rerecording it and then playing off it. It didn’t take long for me to veer off course playing to the vocals and ended up with new riffs altogether. Since I only had a couple of free hours to do my recording I quickly came up with possible verse, chorus, and bridge lines, recording a few variations I could rearrange later in Logic. Then I went back and recorded a few variations of bass lines.
Over the course of the evening and part of the next day I would spend some hours cutting, pasting the riffs, mixing as I went, using the Line 6 Pod Farm 2 plugin for my major tone effects on guitar, bass and vocals. I rerecorded some of the vocals and a quick one-shot solo on Thursday night. By then I had the intro and the first verse through first chorus done, and a rough arrangement of the rest of the song. Much left to do. I stayed up late Thursday night to finish arranging as I wanted to only do minor tweaks and mastering Friday morning. And had a flash of an idea for an outro, grabbing some samples from soundsnap.com that I could mash together.
Of course, I still had to go to work. Picture me on a bus, mixing furiously on a laptop with the Pod GX cable snaking out of my backpack.
By the Friday evening deadline I had a fully mixed and self-mastered rock song, not perfect (is anything, ever?) but pretty damn good, called “Balls in Play” and went to upload it to the 2K listing via Sonicbids. The first question that came up during the submission process: Have you played any sold-out concerts in an arena? And that was it. This turned out not to be an indie-artist listing at all. Balls.
AND YET, and yet… I feel very satisfied. This was like a final test of everything I’ve learned in the last few years and I feel like I passed! In 2005 I didn’t even own a guitar. Now I have the tools and ability to produce music at will. Bonus: now I have another song for the “Summer’s End” EP, and that killer riff will become an instrumental. All for you. No charge. Coming soon.
Here it is, “Balls in Play”. Dedicated to the San Francisco Giants!
