The Musical Diary of Greg ScheerAs you may know, I recently returned from a 2 week trip to Uganda to train East African worship leaders. Over the next few weeks I’ll be creating 8 audio reports from the trip–kind of NPRish things, with narration and music. Eventually, the reports, photos, and unedited recordings from the trip will be housed on their own web page at the CICW site. For now, here are links to the first 2 reports: report 1, report 2.
As a special bonus for you, my loyal musicblog subscribers, here is a little tune I recorded one afternoon at the Humble School where the worship training took place. The recording is a bit windy at first, but it gets better.
Here are the rest of the songs I recorded last weekend while at Notre Dame. Please listen with gracious ears–there are lots of musical warts.
“Everything to Me” is a song I’ve sung a million times at coffee houses and such. I often start a set with it because I could sing it in my sleep. Also, I like the way the first line gives voice to what most people are probably thinking: “That’s just what we need–another song.” “Hope and Humor” is another song that’s seen well over a decade of action. I wrote it at the end of my year in Austria as a travelogue of an itinerant musician. Strangely, I told the staff of COS one of the stories from this song (“Standing in the rain for hours”) yesterday at our staff retreat. “Have I Gone Too Far?” is another one of my many songs about songs. In this particular case, I was obsessing about the fact that my music is usually to complex for the pop world and too simple for the art music world. My rendition here doesn’t really capture the jazz ballad style I’d like it to have. (As a matter of fact, there are certain chords I didn’t capture at all.) Finally, “Five Days without You” is a goofy song I wrote the first time my wife and I were apart for more than a day.
I attended a conference at Notre Dame this weekend. In my spare time I annoyed people at the Morris Inn by recording some songs in my room. I’ve only had time to gussy up two of them so far: “Silent Star” and “Let It Go.” They’re just rough, one-take demos, but they get the idea across. I’d love to hear some feedback on these, because I’m thinking about making some “real” recordings of a few of them in the future.
Two technical sidenotes: 1. A few people have said that they can’t get the mp3 links to work. Are other people having that problem? I tried a different linking system for the above songs, so let me know if it solves the problem. 2. When I mixed these songs in Audacity I got a muddy, slightly overblown sound. It sounds fine in Audacity, but when I play the mix in iTunes it’s much louder. Anyone have any ideas?
Addendum: Here’s another one along the same lines–“Happy Birthday, Goodbye.”
My wife told me that my music blog is boring. Well, she didn’t say boring, but she thought it would be more interesting if I included more personal stuff to make things more…bloggish. When I get a little time I intend to record more songs for the blog, but for now I have to work with what I have.
And what do I have?
For now what I have is a demo of a song I co-wrote with Jackie Worth, called Dance!. Jackie had already placed some songs with a teenage girl group called The Gemz and heard that they were looking for new material. There’s nothing I love more than a compositional challenge, so I got to work. It wasn’t long before I realized that I was not going to be able to write convincing lyrics from the point of view of a teen girl, so Jackie bailed me out. The result is this demo.
The sad conclusion to this story is that The Gemz didn’t end up using the song. So if any of you have any leads with other girl groups, feel free to tell them about “Dance!”
Having trouble with the above link? Try this: Dance!