My Silent Scream, a musical collaboration

Hello, steemians, and welcome to my page!

This is a song that I've been working on for several weeks now, probably more like 2 months. Another steemian, Hive account@diebitch approached me with the idea of me putting music to some poetry that she had written for the purpose. I copied the words that she wrote and spent some time trying to decide what kind of music would fit the words. The poetry was dark and bitter, like black coffee...

I finally came up with some music that I thought would fit the words, a dark distorted guitar track that I used as the basis of the song. I decided to do the song in 6/8 time to give it a bit more of a dark edge. I was at a loss for what to do for a drum track until I downloaded the Addictive Drums program that came with my Focusrite audio interface. I found a beat that I liked in 6/8 time and recorded it into Audacity from one computer to the other using 2 audio interfaces to make the connection. I have no idea how to record VSTs directly into Audacity, so I improvised.

I recorded all the other tracks to the drum track to keep the time steady. I recorded the guitar track using my Ibanez semi hollowbody guitar using my Rat pedal straight into the audio interface. Then I recorded the bass track directly into the audio interface from my Peavey bass guitar.

From there, I worked on the vocal tracks. I discovered that I needed a 3rd verse for the song and told Diebitch about that, so she wrote another verse for the song. Once I had all the sequences figured out for the verses and the chorus of sorts, I recorded the main vocal and then I recorded 2 harmony vocals, one high, and one lower than the main vocal.

Then I ran into a wall. I can just barely play the guitar well enough to record music using bar chords, lead guitar is completely beyond me right now. After messing around with the guitar a few times and realizing that I wasn't going to be able to do a lead track myself, I decided that I needed the help of someone who can play lead guitar. I wasn't sure who I was going to ask until I heard a collaboration by Hive account@dflo and Hive account@veckinon done over a song that Hive account@soundwavesphoton and I had collaborated on earlier in the year. I really liked the sound that Veckinon had on that track, and the way he played it, not too much, and not too little, just right. So I asked him if he would be interested in doing a lead for the song, and said that he would be interested, so I sent him what I had so far. Yesterday, he sent me the lead track so I could mix it down with the song.

I've been having problems with the computer that I recorded the tracks on, it sometimes doesn't save the audacity files properly, so whern you open the tracks again, stuff is missing.
I opened the tracks that I had in audacity and mixed the song down to my liking, mostly just subtle track volume adjustments, and adding a touch of reverb to the vocals, and adjusting the volume of the lead track to match the rest of the song. I got everything just the way I wanted it, and exported it to a wav file, except the program wouldn't finish the render to WAV. After trying it sever times, I realized that the only way I was going to be able to finish the song with the lead was to use the previous mix that I had rendered to send to Veckinon. It's not as polished as it could be, but it was the best thing I could do in the face of the other computer not being able to do the job. It still came out pretty well, considering that I couldn't mix it quite as well as I wanted to.

As far as I'm concerned, Veckinon's lead work really brought this song together, it finished the song quite nicely.

And so, here is the link to my soundcloud where I uploaded the song. I hope you enjoy it's dark gothic tones.
https://soundcloud.com/ambers-rambling-writings/my-silent-scream

All of the SBD reward for this post will be split between Veckinon and Diebitch, without whom this song would not have been made.