There is No Excuse for Clipping

Now I know how Rush must have felt when they got the first mix of Vapor Trails…

It’s a good thing these are just demos and not a real attempt at doing anything… real.

So the vocals… the clipping… the distortion. No excuse. It’s spoiled the entire song for me.

This is the second of two songs that I recorded in their entirety using GarageBand for iPhone. My ability to get a good vocal take on an iOS device is iffy at best, but I was just all over the place with my iPhone today.

Tonight, when I did the iOS mix of this one the vocals sounded bad, but they always sound bad, you know? They were worse than most of the songs I’ve done this month, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Then I ported the file to the Mac and I could actually see the waveforms. Uh oh. Then I actually played the track. Oh damn, what a mess.

Sorry about that.

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As soon as I heard how distorted the vocal tracks were I listened back to the iOS mix to see how bad it sounded there. Now that I knew what I was looking for, yeah it’s there. It just doesn’t seem quite as insultingly awful on the first mix.

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I suppose I could go back and rerecord, but June ends on Monday and it’s a kid weekend. I don’t have time to do any more vocal recording. I’m stuck with this, unless I want to fix it next month. I won’t want to fix it next month though. The best this can hope for is that I rerecord the entire song from scratch at some future date.

Lawn Mower

The first lawn mower we had at this house was given to us by Jen’s mother and step father. It was excellent for the first year, but when I brought it out for year two something broke off (I can’t remember exactly) and it would no longer start.

We went out and bought a new mower for year two. It was a self propelled push mower. It had balls so big that it didn’t cut the grass, it terrified the grass so badly that the grass cut itself. It was also heavy and the handle was just low enough to make my ridiculously tall self have to bend over a little. Only a little, but enough that my back hurt like hell after each mowing. It worked well for year two in the new house, but when I took it out for year three it wouldn’t start (are you seeing a pattern?). It was probably just the spark plug or something dumb like that, but I couldn’t get the damn thing out to try and change it. I don’t have a socket long enough, and every time I tried to get one it would be just wrong enough to not help.

So for year three I borrowed a mower from my father. He had a new one and I took his old one. It was a small push mower that was very light. The handle was as low as my super mower but the thing overall was so light it didn’t result in back pain. That one wouldn’t start either, but it wasn’t designed by assholes and I was able to change the spark plug all by my self (like a big boy). It worked swimmingly all through year three and for the first two mows of year four (this year).

Then two weeks ago I tried to start it. It chugged weakly for a few seconds and conked out. That was it. No more mowing for that puppy. Last Thursday I took it to a small engine shop in Methuen. Today I picked it up. All better. It runs, it had a tune up, and it had it’s blade sharpened (which is good because with all the leaves in the back yard I tend to abuse those blades).

When I came home today my first thought was, “WOOHOO the mower is fixed!”

Then I thought about it for a minute and considered the implications on my weekend.

Crap, the lawn mower is fixed.

Fat Finger Syndrome

I posted not long ago about how for the first time ever I used GarageBand on my iPhone to record a song from start to finish, top to bottom. It was a happy little up with people flavored post.

I actually had two songs this month on the iPhone. This morning I finished the vocals on the second song.

Never again.

I had the worst case of fat finger syndrome ever recorded in human history. You want to move the cursor from one block to another? Well hey, let’s drag this guitar segment along with it, and in doing so erase two other segments. Hey, now let’s repeat that nearly catastrophic error like four times!

Never again!

New Flickr Layout

Did you know Flickr was bringing out yet another new layout? I didn’t, but I’m pleased.

I really liked the initial redesign. Then the second redesign rolled out and… I liked it, but not as much. I still preferred it to the “old” Flickr, but there were a few things that bothered me.

I’ve spent all of 3 minutes looking at this third new design and I like it 1000 times more than version #2. I think it’s close to redesign #1, but I’d still like to see the film strip style display for groups and albums (not sets anymore, albums). It’s still better than the last update which showed the film strip but not the image you were looking at within the film strip. I think it defaulted to the most recent pics.

Thanks Flickr!

Stolen Melody

Yes, yes I know. The guitar melody sounds a lot like the jazz standard “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” I understand and I’m sorry, but it’s so rare that I come up with an instrumental melody that I just have to run with it when I get one.

The vocals… what happened. This was the first time I recorded vocals into a GarageBand file using an iPad in over two years. I think I have now figured out why it’s so thin and awful, but it’s too late to fix it now. It shouldn’t happen on any of the vocals I record from now on, but there might be one or two already in the can that have the same issue.

The lyrics are about feeling old and useless. Nothing major.

I used the GarageBand Drummer on the Mac Mix, but I don’t think it deviated that much from the iPad version.

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And here is the iPad version.

Hyperactive Drums

First off, the inspiration for the lyric was my MacBook Pro being unable to connect to my wireless mouse. I kid you not, that’s where it started. It sort of evolved into a fictional account of one of my customer’s network about to crash. I am an uber nerd and I am proud of it.

When I originally worked this out on my iPad I had it set for ¾ time. I should have set it for 6/8. I wanted an eighth note pulse. Instead of fixing things properly, I kept it on ¾ and drastically increased the tempo. Close enough.

Then I ported the file over to my Mac and tried to replace my shitty drums with GarageBand’s Drummer.

Oh yeah… that ridiculously fast tempo. Somehow though… I like the hyperactive drums. Let’s keep it! Rawk!

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And for comparison sake, here is the iPad version.

Hardware for a Couple of Bruins

The NHL awards are tonight. Tuukka Rask won a much deserved Vezina trophy (the award given to the top goalie in the league) and Patrice Bergeron won the Selke trophy in an absolute no-brainer (the award given to the best defensive forward). Zdeno Chara lost out in his bid for another Norris Trophy to Duncan Keith (the award given to the best defenseman).

Congratulations to everyone who took home some hardware tonight, especially to the Bruins.

Still would have preferred a Stanley Cup.

A Sort of Almost New Song… Sort Of

I had a neat idea for a riff but I was busy doing other things and couldn’t record it for future reference. When I did get a chance to sit down with a guitar later that night I couldn’t quite remember it. I came up with something that was in the ball park and that became the verse in the song I posted last night. The next night the forgotten riff came back to me and it became the chorus on this song. Hence the reason why the two little suckers sound so similar.

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And here is the iPad mix. I used the drummer function when I mixed on the Mac, which is why the drums will sound seriously different on this mix. Everything else is similar, although all of the processing is different.

Biggest Nerd Lyric Ever

I’m trying to sneak a lyric in before work.

The other day I read an article about CERN and their belief that there are bigger breakthroughs than the Higgs Boson still to be found.

This morning I realized that “laser beam” and “particle stream” rhyme.

Oh the nerd lyric possibilities!

The First Mac Mix

Duck and cover kids, here come the Mac Mixes.

This that song that I couldn’t play the riff for, yet again. While working on the Mac I reserve the right to change the drum sounds and the bass sounds, and to change all the signal processing on the guitars and vocals. Also, I reserve the right to replace the drum parts with the GarageBand Drummer function, although I didn’t do that on this song.

I did change the drum sound and the bass sound, although I just ended up using the Mac version of the same bass sound I used on the iPad. They are close to the same, but the Mac version just sounded a little fatter. The only change I made to the guitar was to swap the panning. The rhythm guitar is doubled with each one panned most of the way to either left or right. One of the tracks used the neck pick up on the Strat, the other used the middle pick up. On the iPad version the neck pick up was to the left. On the Mac version it is to the right. For the vocals I changed the preset and the EQ. I also added compression to the drums, the bass, and both vocal tracks, and to the full mix. Just a little on the mix.

Here is the new mix…

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