The time has come once again for SpinTunes, and this time I'm entered as a contestant! The round 1 challenge was as follows:

There's No Place Like Home - Write a song about YOUR hometown.

You should use the name of the town in the song at some point. The town you pick can be your place of birth, where you grew up, or where you're living now; but it has to be someplace you have actually lived at some point in your life. If you once took a 2 week vacation to Florida...that does not count. We mean someplace you have roots of some sort.

I've lived in South Bend, Indiana for the past three years now. It's a great place, nestled comfortably between "small town" and "real city". We get four seasons most years (seemed to skip Spring this time around), excellent family neighborhoods, and it's an easy drive or train ride to Chicago if we want to see a large-budget show or eat at a four-star restaurant.

As for the song, I expect the most frequently asked question will inevitably be "what do you have against St. Louis?" Perhaps I'll even get me an arch enemy out of the whole ordeal. The reality isn't so interesting. I actually think St. Louis is a beautiful place, and considered moving there at one point. Its two largest flaws are syllabic pattern and luck. To fit the song the way I wanted, I needed a city with three syllables, and the stress on the middle one. Candidate cities: Milwaukee, Miami, St. Louis, Toledo, Eureka, Ann Arbor. You may think of more, but my die has six sides so I stopped there. The roll came up "3", so St. Louis it is, despite that being by far the most difficult of the six to sing high.

Speaking of singing, this one was tough. Obviously influenced by "We Are The World", I took the composition job seriously and wrote for many diverse voices to sing it. That meant taking the pitch up and down quite a way to give a place for all voice types. As it turned out, the original melody exceeded my personal vocal range. It was well over 2 octaves all told, so in order to hit the higher harmonies, I couldn't get a good quality on the lowest notes. Given the options of recording up and transposing in software or changing the composition, I opted for the latter. I took the chorus down to a lower point, and transposed the whole piece up a minor third. It still clocks in at 2 octaves plus a half step, but I think it sounds better this way.

Oh yeah, and first ever song produced entirely in Logic Pro! GarageBand has been good to me, but it's time to move on. Hope there are no bad feelings. For one thing, features aside Logic Pro is much easier on my bottom-of-the-line laptop processor. GB was complaining of lack of resources at 6-7 tracks. This song has 22 with all the vocal harmony and clapping and more layers of effects than I used to do. I also love the ability to bus primary tracks together to aux tracks, either via sends or output. I was able to balance all the drums individually with separate eq for the kick, an '80's-style gated reverb for the snare, and doubled hi-hat panned hard left and right, blend with the bass and claps, and adjust all that as one unit through my "Rhythm Section" aux channel. Really cool stuff.

Finally, I have the nagging feeling that the melody that starts the choruses has been done before, but I can't place it. If anyone finds out I'm infringing on a prior work, please let me know and I'll change it. For some reason I'm thinking late '70's / early '80's ballad.