The Sunday Song: I Will Be There For You
I wrote this song for my son. He’s been having migraine headaches and some sort of sinus infection, and has missed a lot of school. He’s also just turned 11, and you can see him growing up day by day. But I suppose it could be from anyone to anyone, really.
Guitar is in double-dropped D, then capo III; song’s in Bb. It still could use a fresh vocal track, a fresh bass track, and it’s missing the backing vocal part from midway to the end (software crash ate it).
I Will Be There For You
You say you miss me but I am not going
Don’t mistake returning for loss
When you go crying I will be there for you
Our paths never fail to cross
And when you are smiling my hopes are there too
Anytime you have dice to toss
I will be there for you
When the world is valleys and mountains
Take this song for your pack
When the world is shudders and kisses
I’ll follow a parallel track
When the night comes and cold is the darkness
I’ll be a light at your back
I will be there for you
Sometimes even the light hurts
And sometimes it’s the sounds
Under the blankets and under the silence
Don’t forget what keeps coming round
From first steps together through all kinds of weather
I will be there for you
When you are frightened or burdens need lightened
I will be there for you
I’ll give you my whispers, soothe all the blisters
I will be there for you
Whenever wherever
I will be there for you
You say you miss me
But I’m not going
I will be there for you
12 Responses to “The Sunday Song: I Will Be There For You”
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Good song.
If you know a violin player, some soloing might sound nice after the first and last verses. Instead of ending with the piano and guitar regular, a violin or guitar solo could trail off by itself (the accompaniment drops out).
You’re sweet and it was a nice song!
I love the piano sound here. I remembered my favorite song “A thousand miles” which the intro was played in piano. I always try to listen to it everyday.
But nowadays, i haven’t involved myself into any music because I’m so busy playing world of warcraft game. All i want is to gain a higher level. And because of that i forgot my passion on music.
Anyways, thanks for sharing your beautiful song dedicated to your son. Have a blessed day! Hope he’ll get better this following days.
Hey you guys keep your chins up! A song is a wonderful gift..and will make for great memories! 🙂
Beau
I had the exact same problem (sinusitis + migraines, which together apply a ridiculous negative multiplier to happiness) as your son at that age, and speaking from personal experience you might want to have his eyes checked, especially if he doesn’t yet have glasses as he might not know the difference a valid prescription can make… and in my case it didn’t help the eyestrain any staying up all night reading by flashlight… he has my sympathies =)
Great song. What did you use to record? If you can give me the stems, I can add Bass, soft drums(if you like). Otherwise great arrangement and very good lyrics, piano is moving and I think you choose a great key to work in. Thanks for sharing.
My sympathies, too. 🙂 I just exited a major headache from Saturday night, which seemed to be focused on my visual pathway.
Also, the song is lovely. I tried writing a poem with the same theme back in 12th grade for a.. friend, but this is what I was really trying to write.
Good work, Raph.
1. Which axes did you use?
2. How many tracks? Are you playing and singing at the same time?
3. Yeah, a little more bass and a melodic bass line, but that’s a taste call and you should do what works for yours, not mine.
While working on the IrishSpace vids, I’ve been experimenting with the 5.1 surround sound mixing in Sony Vegas. Still a newb, but it’s easy to do. The software enables access to the Audition editor but has some decent eq and other VST plugins. One trick is to take the stereo or mono track and copy it to all of the surround tracks and eq and set position and effects slightly different. It enables a very rich room sound. For fun, you could take one of your songs and work up a vid for it. Addictive.
BTW: all five episodes of the IrishSpace piece are now up at YouTube for anyone who wants to go diving into ancient VRML history. The good news was other than commenting out the HTML browser LoadURL lines from the kiosk version of the piece, it all works over a decade after the content was written. At the time I said that people doing 3D graphics forget the dimensionality that a piece gets when music and the human voice are added.
Pulling all that back together this many years later and adding incidental music for transitions, I am pleasantly surprised how well this all works just taking screen captures with Jing and mixing it all back together in Vegas. The only limit seems to be the ten minute limit on YouTube uploads and that isn’t hard to work with. Machinima certainly has a bright future combined with music and bands paying attention see it.
I double-miked the acoustic guitar with an ATM41HE pointed at the 12th fret from around 4 inches away, and an AT4033a/SM around 18 inches away, both with pop filters on.
The vocals are on the ATM41HE. The “ooohs” in the backing on the bridge are run through a Digitech Vocalist Live 4 to get automatic harmonies.
From there it goes into a Tascam 4 track I use as a mixer, then into Acid Pro 7.
The clarinet and piano parts are played live on a Yamaha P70, with VSTs.
This is on the Blueridge. The bass is a Washburn.
Acoustic guitar: added a small bit of reverb.
Lead vocal. Close to dry.
Bass.
Backing vocal is a doubled stereo track panned hard left and hard right.
Piano.
Clarinets.
No, actually. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I get better timing but worse vocals when I do. And this song was kind of hard to sing (I have a bit of sinus congestion right now, hitting that high note was hard). This was the only vocal take, whereas I had to do the guitar a couple of times. There a little inversion on the picking pattern, 2nd chord in the verse, that I kept messing up. 🙂
I did the bass like four times, and at first I thought I needed to make it move more, especially as the song built. Then the movement started to show up more in the piano, and now I think I need to background it more — there’s places, specially as the final repeated verse starts, where you can hear the bass bumping along and it just doesn’t seem to need to.
The thing that is missing for sure is that the final verse is supposed to have harmonized backing vocals repeating the refrain under all of that, and that audio clip got corrupted in one of the crashes. I had already gone and adjusted the mic levels, so it was more work than i wanted to do just then to recreate them…
Thanks for the blow by blow, Raph. I usually also cut vocals separately for the sake of eq, effects, etc.. OTOH, I’ve noted that when I cut with the axe and vocal at the same time, I get a more expressive cut. There is something of a synesthesia effect where the emotions and the physicality of playing while singing are done together. It’s like live shows: imprecise but evocative.
I get beaten up regularly by people who hear the voice/acoustic version then hear the production version later: “I like the first one better.” I guess if I had to make a living again doing it, I’d listen to that, but when recording, “it’s my party and you can try if you want to”.
I get the point about piano and bass. If there is moving arppegio anywhere, the bass will drown it. A touch of Leland Sklar ain’t bad though particularly if you have a touch for the fretless. My old bandmate, Steve Weber, drops in occasionally and he has a magic touch for that sound. He never leaves a track that doesn’t dimensionalize the song. It’s amazing how much a decent contrapuntal bass does for a vocal arrangement.
Corrupted parts: yeah, it used to be a bad hand on the board. Lost a lot of fab tracks to bad engineers (“I’m sorry, did you mean to keep that?). Now I lose’em to software. 🙂 I watched Vegas eat two weeks of work on IrishSpace when it corrupted the project file. I used to get depresssed by that but now I mutter something obscene and move on.
You undoubtedly won’t like what I’m going to say here, but…this is such an amazing song, and so wonderful, that what you must do is copyright it, but then sell it to someone else who can sing it better than you can. I mean, you could coach them on some of the backstory, but you must somehow give this song to the right performer. I think you have a basic conflict within, which is that your song-writing is better than your performance and your performance is other times better than your song-writing, it’s kind of a Carole King problem needing a James Taylor. Of course, I realize you do this for the pure joy of it, and for your family, and that’s ok too. It’s ok to be an imperfect amateur. But…it’s such a good song…
As for your son, it’s a classic case of allergies. They set you up to have chronic sinusitis, which sets you up to have migraines. So start now to get your son tested not just on the skin scratch tests but blood tests on all the basic allergens and then get Hepa filters and all the rest. Otherwise, you are going to find it worsens and worsens and will need surgery.
Prok, I take that as a compliment, not as something that I wouldn’t like to hear. 🙂
We have in fact started on the allergy stuff. He did the skin tests a couple of weeks ago, and the verdict was just dust mites and molds.
I have to say, having been on this allergy train for years and years with my son and gone through all the tests up and down, that the results change all the time. And they are also wrong sometimes.
Also don’t be afraid to be obsessive and check for swine flu, the worst that can happen is you will be wrong.