Jay's Songs

My longtime friend Jay, an extraordinarily creative person, who I have long chastised for toiling away much of his life in the public service, has finally got around to expressing himself.

So important if you are creative, and for Jay, who could turn his hand to any creative endeavour, it has manifested in the form of music. Having disciplined himself to taking guitar lessons, a little while back, his burgeoning skills on the instrument have allowed him to become a prolific songwriter resulting in a current project to record them.

In his inimitable way, he has convinced half the able musicians in the region to contribute their time to the project including myself. Knowing of my endeavours on the piano, he invited me to add keyboards to three of the tracks which I have just completed and thoroughly enjoyed.

Apart from my wonderful big black Yamaha U3 upright piano, I also own an 88 note Yamaha S90XS digital piano synthesiser which is the perfect tool for this job married with Apple's brilliant digital audio workstation (DAW) Logic Pro 8.

Jay and his recording team, Mick,  live some distance away and not being keen on the idea of travelling to complete any recording, I was intent on finding a means to complete the tracks without doing so and Mick kindly sent me the template track for each song.

This allowed me to record using a midi track, rather than audio, and utilising Logics soft instruments with the S90Xs as a controller. 

 

I chose this environment as having completed the recording, I could use Logic's export 'All tracks as audio files' (retaining all the midi information) to save both the template and the midi track and upload them to Dropbox. All Mick has to do then is download them, drag and drop them in to his DAW and chop and change the track as required, including changing the keyboard sound I have used, if Jay prefers. Brilliant!