Be You is a song that features my friend Peter Nelson on guitar. He’s from Canada and quite a good musician so check him out! 🙂

This another song that took a lot of wrangling to get “right”. Just to give you a sense of how this process goes (because no, we don’t get it right the first time out usually), I’ll tell you:

I started with a totally different beat, a beat I generated from a cheesy Casio synth rhythm. I ran that through a guitar distortion pedal, and recorded it twice. That made these weird things happen when the cheese beat did its little fills and stuff. I thought that was cool. Then I played real drums over the whole mess. The problem was all of that was really “muddy”. If you’re not an engineer type, muddy means the “low end” – the bass and bass drum frequencies basically – was totally obscured. Muddy sounds kind of muffled. The bass I did didn’t help. It was also crappy! It sounded bad 🙂 I did keep the crazy distorted cheese beat just barrreeeellllly. 🙂 At the VERY end, listen for a lo-fi sounding snare drum kind of thing that goes “bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu” to end the song 🙂

The other problem was the chorus was SOOOOO BORING. It went “whoa oh oh be you be you. whoa oh oh be you be you”. I was really having problems with choruses. After months of wondering what to do, I finally sat down and tried again and finally I liked it. The next night I couldn’t sleep because my mind was envisioning how to redo the drums and bass, right down to the exact timbres I would use. I finally liked the results, and the feedback from friends was much better. Yay!

Topically, Be You is pretty straight forward. Be yourself! I was doing all this work trying to learn how to write for licensing – for film and TV and advertising, how to be like they wanted. The problem was, what they usually wanted was somebody to be just like some famous artist – as if what other people had to say didn’t matter. I’m not saying the people who do ads and film/tv are evil or something, it’s just that as an artist you can get caught up in that and forget that you actually can’t be like so-and-so. You can learn from so-and-so, and you can learn a lot from thinking about what other people need, from film producers to ad execs to just people out in the world. But in the end, the only thing you can be, and the thing that will be the MOST powerful and engaging is if you learn what you can, but then BE YOURSELF. So that’s why the lyrics in the chorus changed to what they did. There’s a hundred million things they will tell you do…and no you won’t lose out by being yourself. So be YOU.

Ok that’s what I have to say about that – the credits are:

-- Aaron J. Trumm “Be You”

-- Produced by Aaron J. Trumm

-- Guitars by Peter Nelson

-- Vocals: Aaron J. Trumm

-- Mix: Aaron J. Trumm at NQuit Music

-- Mastering: Aaron J. Trumm at NQuit Music

Ok – thanks for reading! I’ll see you tomorrow!

— Aaron

PS: If you want to say something about Be You – or tell me your version of being yourself – email me at aaron@aarontrumm.com or come talk to me on socialz - you know the deal.