Tracking is going well. I worked on the song “Warlords” today. It is a great four player game.
The song is one of two that are still without lyrics. I think I ‘m going to stay up for a while tonight and try and work some out.
I used my 414 on the Blackheart amp once again … in tandem with a line out to my isolation cabinet. I’m a little concerned because my amp fizzled a little on me today. Very unsettling.
The intro to the song is a sequence of cut up guitar feedback. Working on it has inspired me to create another VSTi. I need to create a chromatic sample bank of various forms of guitar feedback.
Here is a very rough idea of what the intro to Warlords will sound like:
The final version will make some sense of the chaos….
Today I tracked the electric guitars for the song “Atlantis”. It is a fuzzed out, futuristic, electro ballad.
I didn’t get a chance to record vocals or the small acoustic guitar line … I spent a while figuring out the problem with one of my guitar amps. I think I solved the problem.
I think the 1/4″ speaker jack that comes off of the internal speaker is too small for the receptacle. When the amp heats up, the jack pops out a fraction of an inch. I’m hoping that this bad contact point was responsible for the intermittent shorting I was experiencing. I wedged the cable against my other amp to hold it firmly in place and I was able to track for several hours today.
I’m at the point where I don’t know if any thing that I am recording sounds any good. Maybe that’s what has been keeping me from recording vocals the last two days (other than a broken amp).
When I feel like I’m losing perspective, I just head out back and stare out at the Palouse Hills. It helps to remember that I have no label, no band, no tours or deadlines. I’m just doing this because I want to. That also makes it harder in some ways. I have to be entirely self motivated. Part of that is knowing when not to work on something.
I chose to work on the song Night Driver today. It is a fairly simple song, so I figured it would be a breeze.
I thought wrong. I had a heck of a time getting the right guitar sound for the end of the song in particular. Then my amp fizzled out. I’m hoping it’s not a bad transformer - I swapped both the power and preamp tubes out and it worked for a while and then fizzled out again.
I could have swapped a bad tube for another bad tube … I don’t know.
I can always use my Delta Blues, but I’ve been having better luck with the Blackheart.
So … not too much to report. I didn’t even get a chance to do any vocals. The guitar amp problems just killed my day. Keeping my fingers crossed for tomorrow.
Lost Luggage is a song I wrote on acoustic guitar. It ended up getting some upgrades today in the recording process.
I think I ended up with about 8 inter-locking guitar parts that play out for the end. I’m pretty happy with it.
Both the guitar and vocals were recorded with a 414. I feel like the vocals are about 90%. The end has some pretty difficult notes for me to hit, and I kind of started running out of steam at about 8:30pm after tracking all day. My ears got tired too. I’ll probably re-record a couple spots later.
When I need a break I go out back and try and integrate myself into the feral cat clan that lives behind my moms house. So far, they have not let me in…
Demon Attack is the final song on my new record “Bits”. It is mostly acoustic guitar with some rockin’ electric at the end.
I started out tracking with my Delta Blues 210 and a Danelectro Daddy-O pedal for just a little overdrive, miked with a Blue Ball.
This quickly went out the window when I tried to get a good tone for the final chords of the song. It just didn’t have the right midrange. I switched everything out for the Blackheart with no pedal. Miked it off axis with a 57. Worked great.
I finished the lyrics for the song today and as I was recording vocals, my sister came over to use the internet. She was in the room right next to mine and I was blasting out some pretty weird words about demon attacks. hmmmmmm……..
Towards the end, the harmonies get pretty stacked so I find it helps to lay the tracks out in a symetrical fashion like this to keep track of the arrangement.
I have decided to post a little bit of Demon Attack here. So this is how it will all end … “Bits” that is. It’s getting there that’s is all the fun.
Some of you may have noticed that my website was gone for a while. I noticed too. It’s back now.
Today’s song was “Kaboom!”. I spent a large part of the day writing guitar parts. I used dual tracking for each take (good ol’ 57 on the Bitmo Modded Blackheart cab into a N72 preamp and a isolation cabinet into a C84 preamp).
Everything sounded great. Somehow my guitar sounded a little like a distorted fender Rhodes. There are a few tonal variations throughout out the song including one full out rock on zone, so I documented every setting for each link in the chain with my digital camera.
I made it through just about half of the vocals for the song in about 3 and a half hours. Much of that time was spend arranging the harmonies.
I went out a shot some night time photography at about 10:30pm. These pictures were taken in the dark with between a 30 second and minute exposure.
I spent the day working on the song “Outlaw”. It is based on the two player shoot-em’-up game starring two opposing cowboys.
Most of my time was spent trying to figure out how to record the electric guitar tracks. I ended up using my isolation cabinet and miking my Delta Blues 210 and combining the tracks. I have a total of four electric guitar tracks panned out in the song.
Actually … I spent a lot of time trying to overcome “Demo Kryptonite Syndrome”. It seems like every time I set out to record a song that I have previously recorded in some way, it is really hard to get the energy back into the song. I’m not much for repetition, so this situation manifests as a real mental roadblock. After what seemed like a zillion years of crawling across some gravel to get away from Lex Luthor clutching a sack full of evil green crystals, I was able to get overcome DKS … for now.
I put my cranked up amp in my sister Auria’s old room across the hall and closed the doors so I wouldn’t have to record with headphones on.
I tracked the bulk of the vocals for the song. There are some 60′ AM radio American Bandstand harmonies, a couple of punch-ins here and there and an acoustic guitar track on the way.
