Song Story
Loser The idea for this song came to me after reading an article by Jeremy Klaszus titled "Christianity is for Losers". The article is pretty self -explanatory. Anyhow, I wanted to capture the stark feeling that this article gave me and the reality of it. The song is very simple and it is yet unfinished, as I entered the first sketch into the KVRaudio.com June 2005 song contest. It won 5th place out of 60 entries. The contest is voted on by people that submit songs to the contest. The placement of the song was surprising as so many of the entries have profanity and related content included. I got some very interesting feedback on the lyrics of the song. The final version will talk about how we win, undeservedly, through Christ's grace.
How I made 'Loser' One of the technical goals I set out for this song, was to record it completely in full takes; no punching in allowed. With today's recording technology, even for the home user, it's very easy to erase out mistakes, replace 'fat-fingered' notes, etc. I decided that for this short song, I wanted to avoid all of that. So there is a single vocal track that is all one take, and a single acoustic guitar track, all one take. I used my CAD M-177 Large Diaphragm Condenser microphone for both tracks. I doubled the guitar track and panned the original and copy hard left/right and eq'ed them a little different. Kjaerhus' Classic Compressor was used on the vocals, and Freeverb Too was used on both the vocals and the guitar tracks. I used Tracktion to record the song. Rendered to .mp3 at 128 bit rate with LAME encoder.