I am putting a lot of additional information with this post. It is for future reference should anyone want to record original compositions in future. It would be helpful.
“She’s Proud of Me [Padrastro y Hijastra]”
I wrote and recorded this song first in 2020, and again in 2021 and again this year, 2022.
Each time it improved as my abilities in piano, music theory, singing and recording improved.
It is a song very dear to my heart.
It has a structure of AABC, where C is a slight variation of A, because it is at the end.
This currant version starts off with an introduction that Hayden put on Utube, calling it “The Most Beautiful Progression”. I agreed and used it. I had to transpose it down to Ab, the key of this song. It lost a bit of its impact during this process.
The chord structure then follows “Misty” or “The Nearness of You” where it goes from the 1 chord, via a 2-5-1 to the 4 chord.
The turnaround at the end of the A section, is actually a 1-6-2-5 but not as chords.
The song is clearly in the English language, but in the B section there are 2 words that are in Spanish. Padrastro y Hijastra. They mean Stepfather and Stepdaughter. They are also in the title.
I wanted to give the C section a little turbocharge and so modulated up a semitone to the key of A. Sometimes that can sound corny, but here it is so subtle I am not sure it is even heard.
I am not satisfied with this version. There are things I could not achieve this time, in terms of the piano playing and singing. I know what they are. I will almost certainly do it again next year or when I have sufficiently improved.
For those interested in technical matters, I recorded the song on a MacBook Pro with Logic DAW. I used Pianoteq Stage 7, for the piano sounds. I used Melodyne App for vocal tuning correction. No other plugins were used. I used a RODE NT2 microphone. I used a Focusrite Scarlett 212, Rokit 5 speakers, and Audio-tecnhnica ATH-R70x headphones.
