The Abyss

The Abyss – An Original Garage Band Creation

When I started recording my original songs, whether it was solo or with Junior Chills, I recorded using the voice record feature on my tablet and phone. Not realising (pretty stupid of me) that I would still be using the same microphone of my device, I downloaded Garage Band in the hope that I would be able to make my songs sound better by editing and mixing them up a bit. Although the recording quality itself for vocals wasn’t great, the different instruments and the effects you could use was, for a novice, excellent.

I remember faffin’ about with the app for ages and I made a few instrumental tunes (such as Head of a Weasel and others which I will put on the blog at some stage). However I inadvertently decided to put together a song using only the instruments available in the app and putting my own lyrics to it. I think it was born out of playing with the guitar instrument in the app and getting some nice sounds from it. I slowly but surely put a varied mix of instruments into it including a strings section, drums, hip hop drums and an electric piano…pretty random to say the least but I think that they come together nicely. I have only recently revisited playing the song as I was finally able to connect my Shure microphone to the tablet to make the vocals a bit clearer with less interference. A word of advice…it was an absolute nightmare finding the right app to allow me to build a video with this song. A lot of the apps wouldn’t play the file for whatever reason despite multiple attempts at converting the file to different file types. Fortunately in the end I got a free app called Viva Video which worked perfectly!!!

The song is made up of two verses which are repeated. It wasn’t so much of a laziness thing but rather I liked the two verses I had and thought that if I was able to put a bit of a beat into the song it would sound good.

In regards to the lyrics of the song itself I like to think of it as a bit of a haunting song. The abyss of life in a way can itself be haunting. Deep in your life when things aren’t going great you can see a light…the light at the end of the tunnel which so many people talk about. It is haunting as although you can see the light at the end, you also see the other things which are all around you. These maybe are the things which have made times difficult for you.

I am a fan of staring into the cloudless sky at night time and looking at the stars and searching for satellites as they move (I saw a shooting star once before which was pretty amazing!!). Maybe there has been a lot of influence from the likes of Predator, Event Horizon, Alien and Interstellar where I wonder what the stars can hold…a species which can wipe us out? A species which wants to wipe us out? Is there just space? Or maybe is there an accumulation of all three? I don’t know…it is only a song at the end of the day.

Here it is. ‘The Abyss’.

D.M.