Daybreak’s Bell

Release date: September 23, 2020. ISRC: QZFZ52035527. DK UPC: 195162463852. Label: 1803039 Records DK

L'Arc~en~Ciel, Performed by Brian the Amateur

(Listen at the bottom of the page)

Since I finished The Brightest Star in the Skies, I had been looking for a project to work on for fun, and I just had to set my eyes on this one, my all time favorite Japanese rock song from my favorite Anime show “Gundam OO”.

At first, I thought I can just use the combo of piano and guitar, like how I did with The Brightest Star in the Skies. Then, I realized that unlike that last song, you just cannot make a rock song without drums. During my “covering” process, I never once read any music sheet. Yep, everything you hear is what I heard and “transcribed”. I noticed that the guitar of this song is just the normal Em, C, G, and D in repeat, to be more specific, it didn’t require capo of any sort, meaning that I don’t have to mess with what the guitar sounded like. That made my life easier because I didn’t have a capo.

The song also had an electric guitar, and I had none, welp, just went with acoustic guitar. All I had to do was repeating Em, C, G, and D for the entire song and I was solid. However, I just started playing guitar, and I wasn’t familiarized, or should I say, good enough to switch between chords that fast. So I had to practice everyday to be able to train myself to have the muscle memory. And the result was good!

The piano was rather easy. I dreamt about doing a cover on this song, and I only knew how to play the piano when I started watching “Gundam OO”, so the harmonies are really easy for me.

This is the first time since kindergarten that I picked up drum sticks. Yeah, I picked drums back up for this song. I of course have forgot everything about sheet reading for drums, but I watched every available video of L'Arc~en~Ciel’s drummer playing this song, and I learned how he played it, and added some of my own flavor into it, and bam. Bought the Yamaha drum sets for this song too.

I started in the Garage Band app, then transferred the files to Logic Pro X half way. The learning curve was big. In Garage Band, when you need to rerecord some parts of the song, the new recording will just cover up the old recording, meaning that you won’t be able to get your past saves. For Logic Pro X, though, it is completely different, because it saves every audio files, and labels them chronologically. It made it really difficult to adjust file length and select which part. Although I have to say that it is a good feature.

The audio was not good, partly because I read on a website saying that it is better to make the master volume -2.0, so it doesn’t have any unpleasant sound that came because your volume was over the bearable amount of your microphone. Well, I didn’t know I could adjust my microphone intake volume, so whenever I raced to higher pitched sounds, the sound I got gave me the unpleasant sound. After I lowered the master volume, the music produced was even lower. I had to go to iTunes to raise up the volume, and thus, it sounded way bad.

I am going to make a new version of this song, using electric guitars among other things, or probably a bass!