I had high hopes for this goofy 12-bar. I don’t know why. It doesn’t live up to my expectations. The vocals are fuzzy again. I’m mad. It does mark the return of the wah wah pedal. I had half a mind to not use it at all after over using it in February, March, and April. Like most addicts, I just couldn’t stay away.
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Here’s the iPad mix. The drums don’t sound as good on this one, but they might be better. I can’t decide today. I might be able to decide some other day though.
Yesterday I posted a song that was recorded entirely on my iPhone and had ugly distorted vocals that I was embarrassed to share with the interwebs. I said that there was one other song from this month that was also recorded entirely on the iPhone. This is that other song.
Vindication, or what?
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Short and sweet with atheist leaning lyrics. 1000 years ago I would have burned at the stake for this tune. I love living in the future!
The drums on the iPhone mix followed the guitar and bass much more closely, especially in the verses. I used the GarageBand Drummer again and while it lost a bit in the verses I think the groove is groovy enough to justify it. I wasn’t gonna, but I did.
This is a little better than the last one. No unwanted distortion.
I didn’t use the GarageBand drummer on this one. I kept the iPad drum part but changed the sound. Same with the vocals. The guitars are all the same between the two mixes except for the signal processing. I added a slap back delay onto the lead and toned down the reverb and delay on the two rhythm parts.
The real question though is when did everything this month turn into either 3/4 or 6/8 time? Is this what it’s like to play in a swing band?
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Here’s the iPad mix for comparison. Again, not too different.
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As far as the iOS mixes are concerned, I can call the June Music project successfully complete (under RPM Challenge rules). I have written and recorded 10 songs this month. There are two additional songs that don’t have vocals/lyrics/melodies yet. I don’t believe I will have time this weekend to finish them. I think I’ll do them next week in the first three days in July before 50/90 starts on the 4th. Then I’ll have 12 “June” songs and one left over from May, with two different mixes of each song. That will make a nice bandcamp.com playlist.
As of right now I am in for 50/90. I have not been writing at a fast enough pace to feel confident, but at least I’ve been building up to it. We’ll see how it goes.
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.
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.
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.
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 are the first seven of what I hope will be 10 new songs for this month. Actually the last two are from last month. I kept the bass, changed the drums, and deleted everything else. It’s sort of like starting over.
Over the last two days I threw together a new recording of the first song I wrote for my 2009 finished-way-after-the-deadline RPM Challenge.
Why? Because the old recordings sound like vomit and I can’t tell if the songs themselves are vomit or just the recording. So maybe if I dust some of them off I can make that determination.
Here’s the new recording…
And here is the old recording…
Both of these files are going to be deleted at some point, when I figure out what to do with the new version.
Inside the Red Head's Head 