A new music store opened up and I stopped in to check out the wares as I’m a sucker for pretty guitars. The place was scantily appointed and had a couple dozen guitars on display. I pulled a 6 string acoustic guitar off the wall, got on a stool, and started playing it. It was out of tune. I tuned it and started digging in.

My wife calls me the master of the 30 second song and she’s right. I get bored very easily and after about 30 seconds or so into a song I switch to another one, and I can do this for hours at a time. Steve, the owner of the store, heard what I was doing and came over and introduced himself. He handed me various guitars to play and asked what I thought of them. I was there maybe an hour and I found out Steve was a lifelong aspiring rocker and even though he was in his 50’s he just new he was gonna make it one day.

Steve’s guitar playing was below minimal ability and sloppy. Add to that that he thought he could sing. OMG. How embarrassing. And he didn’t seem to care that his ability was dismal. He asked me to show him how to play some stuff and I did, but he didn’t respond very well to advice nor criticism.

Couple weeks later Steve called me and said he got a new shipment of guitars in and asked if I wanted to come over and unpack and set them up and I said sure. There was about 20 guitars and I unpacked, tuned, and played all of them. When I was done Steve told me next Sat was going to be their Grand Opening and a radio station was going to be in the parking lot and would I come over and act as an instore minstral and just hang around a play a variety of guitars. He said he’d make it my worth while and I said OK.

After the grand opening Steve told me he had recorded a song on his 4 track machine and asked if I’d check it out. It was a song he had written called “The Free”, and the lyrics were pretty bad. He had downloaded some backing tracks from the web and had them playing in the background with his singing and guitar playing over top of it. It was really bad. Painful to listen to. It was awkward when he asked what I thought. Now, I’m no expert at any of this stuff but I know what I like and I have a sense of quality and Steve was not even in the ballpark. I told him he needs to work on it more.

A few months goes by and Steve emails me an mp3 file of “The Free” and he said he sent his recording to a company in Nashville that “makes” songs for people. Basically, studio musicians that pull the basic idea together and make it somewhat acceptable. But their magic is only so strong and when they encounter challenges like Steve’s they have to open their toolbox of sonic alchemy tricks.

To make it easy to understand, they rolled the tone back on the tracks with Steve’s singing and guitar playing so they were very muffled and all the other instruments and back up singers shown through. By the time I was halfway into listening to the song, which initially impressed me, I noticed something was not quite right. I couldn’t make out the words Steve was singing. They kind of receded into the background. So did his guitar playing. Steve’s singing and playing were only a small percentage of what I was listening to.

There are many tools available to the sound engineers today that allows them to take bad sounds and make them seem less so. Autotone, equalization, noise gates, chorus, reverberation, and on and on.

If you put enough tasty icing on the cake nobody will notice the cake has no flavor.

Something like what I described is what’s going on in this song.
I just listened to it again, and I have a fairly elaborate audio system that allows me to manipulate the sound, and the singers voice is heavily muffled, and “gravely” sounding. There are female background singers but it’s difficult to pull them out. The guitar and banjo are OK but even they sound, uh, different. All in all it sounded like a poor recording. Might be a good song if it was set up properly.