I asked an old friend of mine (from school days) if he’d like to try his hand at writing some song lyrics so we could maybe put them to music as a joint project.  He came up with three excellent sets of lyrics which will make great songs - if I can do them justice music-wise!

‘Jaded Gigolo’ is the first we’ve put together and it’s a very clever story of well, a jaded gigolo! I think there’s a kind of Steely Dan feel about the semi-opaque lyrics so we based the music around a ‘slinky’ Tango theme.

Technical notes:

I often use PG Music’s Band In A Box together with loops and so on, but for this song I programmed all the parts from scratch using MIDI.  I used some MIDI drum patterns from XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums but even these I heavily edited.  I then recorded all the non-drums MIDI tracks to audio using sounds from my Roland Fantom X6.  Rhythm and lead guitar tracks were done using my Epiphone Flying V guitar processed via Guitar Rig 5.  I did the vocals using my usual trusty RØDE NT2 mic. I sweetened the vocals with EQ and reverb in Sonar’s ProChannel tools and also added some ADT effects using Waves’ excellent new Reel ADT plugin. The whole project was done in Sonar Producer X3e.

Everything was mixed in Sonar and mastered there using IK’s T-RackS Grand software with some extra limiter ‘loudness’ provided by FabFilter’s Pro-L brickwall limiter.