Behind the Music - Making of Alone (2025) by Amy-Lynn Denham

The first single I've ever released.

The first music I created and allowed anyone to hear after making an album in my twenties and letting life take most of the music away.

Let me tell you this: It was one hell of an emotional undertaking.

I hadn't made music in years

Literally.

Back in my twenties, I rushed to create an album before my mom died. I tucked myself in my closet with a music making program, listened to thousands of hours of soundloops and clips for different instruments, and strung them together the best I could to create songs I could sing along to.

My dad drove me down to a local studio where I recorded my vocals over the tracks. The mastering was terrible (they couldn't calibrate my levels since the tracks were already done), the result was far more techno than I'd prefer 😆 and for years I didn't even really let many people hear it.

But my mom heard it and that's what mattered.

The track "Alone" was on that first album

When I decided to get back into making music it seemed best to start with something kind familiar. Had I already written a few other songs? Yep. I even put some on YouTube as I was writing them.

But when it came to actually recording the song, familiar felt best.

I had a new music program (I use Ableton, if you're curious) and didn't want to learn it while also trying to figure out how I wanted the song to sound. I knew how I wanted the songs on my first album to sound (they just didn't sound that way yet haha).

So, I pulled out the guitar (that I'm slowly learning how to play) and found the right chords. I sang along, changing some things along the way, and when I felt it sounds almost perfect, I dove headfirst into the program to start recording.

If you want to compare the songs, here they are:

Alone (original circa 2009)

Alone (2025)

The actual "how it was done"

Behind the scenes means a lot of things to a lot of people. I want to not only tell you the story behind the song but break down my process as much as possible. It's a little difficult to walk you through my Ableton set up in a blog post 😆 but I can still share some of the "how it was made" and hopefully you'll find something helpful.

1. Figured out how I want the song to go by playing acoustic, unplugged, and through an amp while singing along.
2. Opened Ableton and put down a steady drum track in the right tempo. This wasn't the drums that I actually used in the song, I just put something down so that I didn't have to work from the click track. I find click tracks very distracting.
3. Recorded the guitar parts (this took time and several takes. I'm still learning how to play the guitar).
4. Spent far longer than necessary playing with effects and guitar amps etc. in Ableton while I tried to understand how the whole thing worked.
5. Recording a scratch vocal set overtop of the guitar.
6. Listened back to the song over and over to figure out what was missing.
7. Added backup vocals and the new hook (I ain't got time for this). This was a 2am major ah-ha moment that I had to record onto my cell phone's video app so I could go back to sleep.
8. Cleaned up the vocals with a proper vocal take.
9. Stripped the drums off and then built my own drum track with MIDI.
10. Added finishing touches and effects.
11. Mastered to the best of my ability after watching about 20 hours of YouTube videos.

And then... I made a lyrics video for it 😉 You can watch that right down there 👇