[#originalmusic] Cross Me - Robbie D ft. Jessamyn Orchard

This song features the oh-so-talented @jessamynorchard singing the hook she wrote for this song. The beat isn't an original--the music being written is being made for the album we're going to be working on to release next year. All the lyrics were written by Robbie D, and the arranging, mixing, and mastering was done by myself.

This was the first song we recorded after deciding to get together and evolve as artists. Rob has been freestyling and writing lyrics for over 15 years, but aside from a few scratch recordings, never put in the time and effort to record a mixtape and perform at shows.

In June 2016, Robbie finally bought a high quality (yet decent priced) cardioid microphone--a Rode NT1-A, and I purchased a copy of Presonus' Studio One 3 Professional Edition. With around 8 years of "experience" making music in a DAW (FL Studio 8 to be exact), I felt confident enough to start acting like a producer.

Here's a picture of Robbie that I took in our homemade recording booth laying down the vocals for the song Cross Me:

It's pretty legit. What you can't see is two panels from a wooden folding door behind Robbie to prevent some of the background noise. While it doesn't look the fanciest, it more than outperformed any expectations I had, and I feel it really comes out in the quality of the vocals themselves. Neither of us have any singing talent worth a damn, so we turned to @jessamynorchard for help. When asked, I remember her response, "I could fart out hooks all day." So Jessamyn, thanks for the help on this one. Props, yo.

After recording our first song, I couldn't wait to get to mixing. 4 months later, we have a 6 track demo. Here's the first song we completed, enjoy!

If you like what you hear, it's free to download so snag it up. The other 5 songs from the Heathen Heaven are available to listen and download for free from SoundCloud. I'll be posting a little bit of backstory for each song, with a different song per day. Any feedback and/or criticism is welcome and appreciated.

---

If you or another aspiring musician is interested in some mixing/mastering for free, contact me at [email protected] and we can talk. I'm providing the service for free at this time to not only facilitate more for me to experiment with, but because I know the struggle as an aspiring musician.

Any and all photos used in this post have been taken by myself.