From Scratch Track to Finished Composition

Over ten years ago I bought a portable recorder called an Edirol R09 by Roland Manufacturing. Since then, whenever a particular melody would come to me, I would fire up the recorder and get it down before the memory eluded me... In the ensuing years I've amassed hundreds of snippets of recorded material, in the form of acoustic guitar, electric, bass guitar, piano, and sometimes just me humming or whistling. It's amazing how I've gotten into the habit of recording all of these ideas, and now I've got a treasure trove of musical concepts upon which to draw.

So I decided to post some of my scratch tracks on my Youtube channel. Here is the scratch version for my composition "Mind Relief".

And here is the most updated version on my Musicoin page. You will notice that this remix is much nicer, with new instruments added and a less drowned out sound to the bass line, as compared to the animated vid.

Speaking of bass lines,it's been so long since I first recorded the original scratch track, and the finished version has gone through so many remixes, that as recently as today I forgot that the latest version didn't even have a bass, but only guitar. I ended up describing it completely the other way around! (apologies to @onemedia) I knew it was only one or the other… That is, the scratch track was bass (2011), and the finished mix was in fact guitar subbed in for the bass line (I'd recorded the masters for that back in 2017). Glad to have that sorted... I think. Yeah that's how it was. Or was it a ukelele? AN ukelele?

In any event, I figured this would be an opportunity to showcase the development of this piece, from scratch track to animated video to finished track and who knows? Maybe even further from here...

Music and images by Greg McCann, the author of this post and owner of this Steemit Channel. To view more of my work, please visit www.fireawaymarmot.com.