Doubtful Sounds Session

Matt was down in Wellington this weekend - well we made it a long weekend and took today off as well. Probably the main stuff we did was go over the track we have so far, working out whether they were done for mixing or we needed to record more stuff. I attempted a first lead line on Where the Wind Blows - re-recorded the bass to make more space for a guitar break, so now have to record a lead line. I figure it will probably take a few weeks to write and then learn the part, then I'll be able to record it properly. Matt is going to finish up Here Right Now, which only has backing vocals but no lead. We played a bit on two new Matt songs: Small Boy and She's the Bomb; started recording an older one of mine (Preaching Jesus - off the lost & stolen demo takes) and a 12/8 chord progression that Matt called Apocalypto - "No matter what the chords are, we can always turn it in to a ballad". Matt's put some demos up on myspace.

Damned if you're rich.

And yesterday, I recorded yet another song. Basic blues, crap guitar playing, kind of depressing really. Spot the lyrics?

You're damned if you're rich: you've had your comfort now.
You're damned if you're well-fed: you've gonna starve.
You're damned if you're happy: you've gonna sing the blues.
You're damned if everybody loves you: think of the idiots everybody loves.

So the catch is, this means I've now got 11 songs down, one of which doesn't really fit with all the rest (see Family Last). So another two then I have twelve, which will do for this project, and I can then get on to something else. I just have to conjure two more songs up from nowhere.

Or perhaps ten songs is enough and I can move on already?

Preaching IV

So, gee, the thing about blogging is that you really have to keep posting, isn't it...

Anyway: the "Preaching" song is more or less finished. It took a while: 20th May for a rough mix which I lost when ProTools crashed (yay!); and then 27th when I managed to redo all that - luckily, I'd made some notes. Less finished because. well, it still sounds like something put together in a bedroom, which is of course precisely what it is. But there are lots of things that are more or less put together in bedrooms or lofts (Black Balloons by Jeremy Taylor; anything by Pine; Moth by Matthew Bannister) that still sound great. In fact, the simpler songs that I've done that are just voice & guitar sound much better than the more complex ones. I don't know why, but I think "mixing" and "mastering" must have something to do with it.

Head Above Water

So, 12.30 AM, that equals the previous record.

Todays effort is quite short at 2.50, not really poppy, rather odd (and again old) little song, Head Above Water Not sure about it really, the vocals are quite weak & flutter in places - on the other hand, I quite like how the guitar sounds.

What's this one about - rather cliched I'm afraid:

keep my head above water
turn my face from the sun
keep my head above the water
now I'm all undone

I'm not sure I remember that far back - but it probably relates to the long and generally depressing time when I was finishing up a PhD. It's nowhere near as - well - Biblical as many of the rest, especially as I think I accidently replaced "flood" with "sun" in one of the verses. Oh well. But then perhaps it's better this way:

I used to laugh about rainbows
I used to smile at the sun
I used to laugh about rainbows
Now I'm all washed up

Hell

Yet another song done: current working title: hell --- although perhaps "Rock'N'Roll" would be better. Nasty digital clipping on the vocals, but well, I quite like it so I'm keeping it.

This is another old song which I've finally got around to recording. That's a good thing

Rock'n'Roll is the devil's music
And it comes straight up from Hell
And if you listen to the sinful rhythms
You'll go straight down there as well

Good news: it's only 12:30. That's a record.

It's not hard

Got another sinner song down: It's not hard.

Yeah, Right, as the billboards say. Not hard at all.

So now it's 2am. I should relax and get to sleep. Work tomorrow.

Family Last

So it's tuesday evening, and thanks to some encouragement I made it downstairs to record something else again. Putting the Family Last as it were. The result is a nice - surprisingly dubby - first attempt at using Ableton LIve to record. Called (Beat your) Children let's just say its a tribute to Family First and their campaign to legalise hitting Small People.

This was also my first attempt at Live which is perhaps why I'm still awake at 3am. Yes its good for loops and drums; and re-arranging and dubbing things up is really really easy. But the actual recording and getting that in time with what's playing turned out to be a nightmare. So the next technical thing to do may be to run Live as a slave to Protools, so protools can record the audio and Live the - other stuff, notably drums, perhaps bass patterns if I don't want to play them all in. So the vocal track isn't really synchronised properly, but most of the rest is OK.

The song, by the way, is I think the most depressing thing I've written. Ever. And the whole sinner project is going to be depressing.

Forever Tuesday Evening

Today I started the new regime of heading downstairs on tuesday evenings starting at 7pm. I don't have to worry about Small Person, I'm not supposed to go to work, just play with music stuff.

Or in today's case, I spent most of the time fighting protools - loading new versions of Multimedia demo plugins: the US based site seemed to have rate-limiting so I couldn't access the site when downloading something, couldn't download in parallel, so that plus OS upgrades plus trying to get Reason Adapted to run all took hours. Turns out I still have a bunch of Protools plug-ins to upgrade by calling customer support, and Reason 2.5 simply won't work with Protools 7, I either have to upgrade Reason - or settle for using Live, which was my original plan. Or - record tracks in Reason standalone, then bring them into Protools, which would be another option.

Finally, after going for about three hours, decided to cut to the chase with the second song on the four-track, The Fire. Again, crap guitars recorded years ago, bleak lyrics. Couldn't be arsed trying to redo it from scratch, as I like the generally noisy feel of the track, so ran a stereo mix of the tape deck, then added in noise with the extra famous Mastererizer, sprinkling of reverb and compression and that's another take.

The big problem is what comes next: I though I had five or six things on the four-track, but really there was only Lazarus and The Fire. So its either back to the notebooks for more songs for Sinner; mixing or re-recording existing Hey Babies tracks (not sure I can face that yet) or something new. Most likely something for Sinner from a notebook, I think.

New Blog

So I now have a new blog. Great.

more time on the computer. less time in the rest of my life.

In other news, I successfully (re)recorded a song from a few years ago, currently called Lazarus. Wavestation drone, two guitars, one voice track. Kind of like a minor blues in C, but I can't really play the guitar in C so the guitar part is crappy (or endearingly lo-fi). Also I started from an old 4-track demo so the timing is a bit random. Perhaps I should do it all over again, but, then again, perhpas not. More fun to do something else I think.