Collaborating on a New Song

Over the past few months, I have had the pleasure of writing new music for a vocalist and lyricist I have not collaborated in years. Dave Gruis, a friend of mine going back to the late 80s, originally we discussed plans for his upcoming wedding and somehow that evolved into creating a new song.

The initial idea was for a basic hymn structure... Something simple.  "Can we do a similar progression to a hymn? Something like 'The Old Rugged Cross'?" he asked.  That is where it began, the first attempt immediately took on a life of its own and I shared the idea with Dave over SoundCloud, from there he ran with it.


Dave wrote the lyrics and laid down the scratch track for the vocal melody. Sent it back and I expanded the guitar.


The next version added in more piano to follow the vocals.


At this point Dave and I have been working online, passing ideas and versions back and forth via Google Drive, Facebook, and SoundCloud. For the vocals, I traveled to his home in northern Minnesota for a recoding session using Garageband and Blue condenser microphones  (Yeti Pro & Snowball). Once home back home in Saint Paul, the song was mixed in Garageband and mastered in Adobe Audition.

The next step was to create some promotional materials. First, the video -  the tools I used were Adobe Premier and Photoshop to piece free stock footage from Pixabay and Pexels. Since my computer is small, I would frequently save exports in Premier and Photoshop to save on processing time. After that, I would assemble the exports in Premier under a new exported version.
(click on the image to the right for more detail)


A few weeks later the final version of the All to God video was uploaded to YouTube under Dave and my accounts released Sept 1.

Dave has been writing songs under the name Generation Echo, and I have been under Ants and Ostriches. We decided to release this song under a combined name taking the first part of his and the last part of mine and flipping it.

The result is 'Ostrich Generation' released on Bandcamp.

Visit Ostrich Generation on Bandcamp

Song/Cover art was created using Photoshop and XP-Pen based on the photography of Jerzy Górecki.