The Monday Sessions: Waiting

About Waiting

So here it is, the first song I’ve written in over 10 years.  Aptly called “Waiting”.  The fact it took me years to pull my finger out to write something and 3 months to record the damn thing, only to end up calling it “Waiting”, is an irony not lost on me.

What initially started out as a little acoustic loop I did during the first lockdown, quickly turned into the starting point of something bit more ambitious.

I took the footage of the loop and edited out the excess pointless bits, and with the bass line and percussion in place, I then had a few ideas for the guitar parts, which I then laid down a few weeks later.

I then had to come up with some lyrics, which are not very inspirational.  I think I originally had a chorus after each verse, but I was never happy with it, so I decided to ditch that part and just leave it as an instrumental but.

I guess the song is about the lockdown and how bored we’re all getting.  There’s a lot in there about waiting and losing your patience.

The part that held this up the longest though, was the electric guitar solo at the end.  I wanted to avoid having a guitar solo, but whatever else I tried just didn’t work.

Finally, upon exporting the project, I imported each audio track into GarageBand- its cheap and cheerful, but most importantly, it allowed me to further edit the audio. 

One of the main drawbacks of the Acappella music app is that you can’t dynamically manage the audio levels as the track plays – whatever volume you set for each track, you’re stuck with for the whole duration.  However, you can export the audio tracks once you are finished and then apply further edits in a DAW – including the ability to turn things up and down as the track plays, which is very handy.

So this allowed me to bring a bit more ambience to the track (using some weird settings on Guitar Rig 5) and process the vocals a little bit more.

Anyhow, overall, I’m quite pleased with this track.  It took me ages to finish it, but I guess it’s the journey that counts and I’ve learnt quite a bit putting this one together.