Writing music is such an interesting thing for me. To have what I had heard in my head, to become real, something tanjible. I think what makes it so exciting is the waiting game. I don’t record it, if it doesn’t stick with me for at least a week. After a week, I just want to hear it. I track some of the instruments in Logic. It will be a good day when I have all of my real instruments back. I am very thankful for Logic, but, it’s a long grewling process. I think I can honestly say after recording Area Code, that I am not against working with a producer one day. I try not to leave any excuses for the industry. I think it’s so easy to overlook something,and I try not to. You’ve got to quantize, so I quantize. Your vocals have to be autotuned, so I autotune. We are used to music being absolutely perfection today. It is a bit crazy. But it’s not as easy as it might sound for a totally blind producer, who may not know all the inns and outs of software such as logic. You can go to Youtube, and watch a tutorial. If you can see it, you can understand what they mean, when they say, click this, and then click that. If you can’t see the video, it a lot of times doesn’t translate, and you are left figuring it all out, without a mouse, and using the keyboard, and frankly, theirs a lot I don’t know.

Quantization is allowing the software to put all the notes perfectly in time on the grid. The problem comes when the sofftware gets it wrong, and then, it’s wrong. when you don’t know how to move the note, you can’t edit. Logic, Midi, is a lot different then working with digital audio. So, what to do? My solution, is to record every part separate. Everything on it’s own track, so when Quantization gets it wrong, I can take all the tracks over to Windows, into the Reaper sofftware, and manually move the digital audio. This means playing the kick, snare, hats, crashes, ride, toms, all at different times, so that I can correct things. Sound crazy? It is. It was really trippy my first couple songs that I recorded like that, and then as odd as it is, my brain started to figure it out and compensate.

I recorded the Hip-hop 808 style drums, acoustic drums, and bass guitar in logic. One really cool secret is making a copy of the bass guitar track, and having that copy be sign wave, so it just pounds the fuck out of subs, along with sounding good without subs. I do love that peace of Logic and midi. After I get everything in time and have things setup in Reaper, I play the guitars. I used the pickup on my Taylor for acoustics. I ran my electric into my new Fendar Mustang Micro, ran out the headphones jack into my audio interface. The best sounding electric guitar tones, I’ve ever recorded. Vocals, I used my Blue Microphones Bluebird. I actually ran 2 autotune plugins, to get things a bit smoother.

To make a some what long story shorter, basically, it takes me about 10-14 hours to build out a flawless track. I honestly believe from what I’ve seen on youtube, and heard in conversation, that the sighted producer community can build out a track within 30 minutes. After all, it’s just a grid, and notes, more than it is playing through the entire song in real time x amount of times.

So as you can guess, by that point, when it is all said and done, it is such a high for me, to take off the producer hat, and just crank the helll out of a song I have written. Just to have it done. to have it real!

For me, every song I write and produce is a lotto ticket. What, if this song, is the song, that someone hears, and it puts me on the map. I say it with every song, and believe it more with every song, and yes with Area Code, I think it could be the one.

The interesting paradigm as someone who has been in radio, and also a songwriter, is I do know what Radio is looking for, or at least believe I am in a different way in tune with that, so after writing a song like Area Code, I do believe it could become a hit.

Area code is a new take on the concept of the small town you grew up in, and haven’t been back to in a while. You can’t believe how much it’s grown, and it tares at your Heartstrings when you drive down what used to be it’s back roads. I was sitting at lunch at work, when the chorus played in my head. I had to grab my phone and write down lyrics. It was a pretty powerful moment for me.

Listen to Area Code below!