About a song: Half Step (1)

July 7, 2008

Welcome, new visitor! My name is Ari, the man behind Aries9. Here I share my thoughts on music and life, so you can get to know me and my music. Thanks for visiting!

I don’t know if I call it a hit, but I knew that Half Step was a special song.

All the songs on my album are special, but Half Step goes one “step” (ha ha!) further in its “specialness” in my mind.

Why? I’m not quite sure if I can put a finger on it. Maybe it just has all the qualities I like to have in my music: aggressive and catchy riff, dramatic shifts, memorable chorus, unexpected turns, poetic and emotional lyrics.

I remember the moment when I stumbled onto this song. Typically, I write verse and chorus in one setting (bridges are often written later — sometimes, much later). I came up with these colorful chords that strangely fit together. The verse goes back and forth between C#m7 and D7. The chorus, G#m7 (with top E open) and A5add9. (Wow, they look complicated when I write them down — the last chord is simply an open A, but with B string open)

And the melody came floating, on top. I do remember grimacing, though, when I came up with it — for it was way too high for my range!

Until these last 2-3 years, I always thought that I was a tenor. I don’t have a deep voice, and I can’t sing that low. My choir directors confirmed this belief — to an extent. I was always a “2nd” tenor.

For those without choral experience — tenor are the half of guys who sing the higher parts among men. They are often broken up further into two groups: 1st tenor sings the highest, 2nd tenor, the next highest. Bass sings the lowest part, and baritones sing the part above that. Though there appears to be a big difference between 2nd tenor and baritone — as we would sing different parts if the choir piece had 4-parts, instead of 8 — actually, that difference is paper thin. I knew baritones who had very light voice and could sing pretty high (they are sometimes called “lyric baritones.”).

Well, I was a tenor who couldn’t sing very high. Thom Yorke is what I think of as a quintessential tenor — high, piercing, light. I used to think that I was like him, until I realized that — well, I’m not. Duh.

I also used to write songs without regards to my own range. Back in those days, I dreamed of finding a singer to form a band with — and a good male vocalist should be able to sing high, I erroneously thought. Besides, this song had such a melody. It goes up and down dramatically. It’d be great for Thom Yorke.

So I let it be, and have had love/hate relationship with it ever since. It’s in a range that I can only hit when I’m very well-warmed up. Some days, I tried to sing this song and fail miserably, and I would feel terrible about myself. Especially after I realized that I better sing these songs myself, as I wasn’t going anywhere with my search for a singer.

On the record, I did pretty well — and relatively quickly. I mean, I didn’t kill the song in a single take, but I thought this was the song that I would labor on for days, doing hundreds of takes. Well, I did that with others, but not this one. I recorded all the vocals in a single session.

I’m particularly fond of the “choir” parts at the end. I wondered if that was too much for this record, as this was to be mostly more stripped-down affair. (well, that idea really didn’t stick around, did it?) But I wanted to have this big, majestic aura with this song, and once I tried building up the choral part, I just couldn’t discard it just to make it more “stripped down.”

On the other hand, I do feel like I didn’t quite do justice to the choruses. I added vocal parts in the background there, too, to add interest as the song progresses. But I think it left the main vocal line somewhat weak and repetitive-sounding in comparison. After the climactic bridge, the last chorus sounds a bit anti-climactic. It’s something I hope to improve when I start playing live with a band.

And speaking of playing live — I’m going to tune down guitars and put this song in a lower key! Nowadays, I write specifically for my voice and I also come to realize that my voice is much stronger in the lower half of my range, even though I can’t sing that low. In the other words, my lack of low range still doesn’t make me a baritone — but I like my voice the best (not to mention it’s much easier to sing) when I’m in the lower half of what little range I do have.

All that said, I still consider Half Step to be a central piece of my first album, the song that I would probably play if I had one song to show for my first record. It’s really impossible to distill my musical range into a single song — but this song covers more ground than others.

And above all, I love the song.

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