[9] Morning Has Broken (Instrumental)


Music by Cat Stevens, with Rick Wakeman, "Teaser and the Firecat" album, 1972


Lyrics by Eleanor Farjean


Rendition by Monty Dicksion, August, 2021


I recommend listening to this song on speakers that are capable of shaking the floor.






I've been playing the guitar part of this song for many decades, but I had never recorded it before.


Before I first began working on this song for my "As Live As I Can Make It" project, I thought it was going to be a simple, mellow solo guitar piece.


Then the other parts just somehow started coming to me, especially when I put a bass line to it.  I knew what keyboard sounds I wanted, and I searched and searched my Roland FA-08 for what I wanted.


The drums was another challenge.  I, of course, don't play drums, although I did sample a real wood blocks sound, which I ended up not using.  But I use a drum plug-in that I like called Realidrums.  Through the first stanza following the song's opening, I did individual drum hit punch-ins where I wanted the sounds to occur.  I also put a few of those in in various other places in the song.


But the main beat is performed by what drum machines call "grooves," which are automated rhythm patterns.  I auditioned dozens of grooves and settled on this one after I turned it down to half-time.  It was really a fortunate discovery.


But the hardest part was getting the drums committed "to tape," so to speak.  The reason it was hard was because there was a stubborn problem getting my keyboard to work with Pro Tools.  What I ended up doing was that I listened to the audio tracks I had so far by playing it back on a second laptop, and recording the analogue signal to another DAW called Audacity.  Then I could save the drum track as an audio file which I could import into Pro Tools and then slide it into synchronized position.


It was a song project that presented many challenges, but I'm very happy with how it turned out.