Not sure about the mix for this one. My left ear hears much better than my right, and I do all of my work with headphones. Sometimes when I have two doubled tracks split left/right I end up having a hard time keeping them balanced. I over compensate one way or another and then I end up throwing all the other tracks out of whack as well. That might have happened here.
Overall I kinda like this one, but as with the last song I uploaded the cutting and pasting feels really choppy. Bad punches all around. The lyrics are about my 1997 decision to go back to college which, at least for a while, turned into a kind of career for me.
This is the 28th finished song for 50/90. I hope to have #29 posted before I sleep tonight. At that point I’ll be out of mixable songs until I can sneak in some vocal time next week.
First, King’s X has a song on their Dogman album called “Go to Hell”. It’s 30 seconds long and it’s balls to the wall and just when you start to feel the groove it ends. I thought I might try something like that. Fast, loud, and over before it goes anywhere. That didn’t end up happening with this song, but that was one of the ideas.
Second, GarageBand for iOS doesn’t have a lot of options as far as time signatures go. I wanted to do something in an unusual time, but I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my mother’s appointment to end and I didn’t have my MacBook on me. So I just did some math. Eight bars of 6/4 time is the same number of beats as 12 bars in 4/4. So I set the segment to 12 bars of four and just played something that felt like 6. It worked. Hooray. Then I tried to replace the original drums using the OSX GarageBand’s Drummer function. All the fills were in the wrong place. I spent 3 minutes messing with it before deciding to just use the original drums. I did change the sounds though.
Third, as 50/90 approaches the end of the second month, lyrics are getting hard to come by. Even when I do have a subject to write about they are just hard to put together. I had an idea for forcing inspiration. I would look up old New England folklore and write lyrics based on those stories. That song is my first attempt. The story is about a guy who, backed with some zombie muscle, kidnapped his crush from her wedding. Not before killing the groom, of course. It’s a nice family friendly tale.
Last month I did a bad instrumental thing inspired by the quiet little instrumental breaks in the last couple of Pink Floyd records. I don’t like the way it came out, but I did decide right away I’d try something similar again before 50/90 ended.
Well, here it is. Break Time pt2 is also Floydish, only this time I was thinking Obscured by Clouds instead of Division Bell. I like this one better, but it’s still more or less a throw away.
I have 25 songs mixed and posted on the 50/90 site. I have 11 additional songs still being worked on. Four of those are ready to mix. I was shooting for 17 songs each in July and August which would leave 16 for September. I may not be on that pace for finished songs, but I’m ahead of it in total.
I might finish this thing.
(Watch me break my fingers tomorrow. Don’t get cocky, redhead.)
I mixed one song tonight after mixing two last night. 50/90 is now 25/44. I hit the 50% complete point one day after reaching the halfway point. I need to step up the pace a little.
Here’s tonight’s song. I don’t really care for it, although it is in 5/4 and makes the prog fan in me happy.
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Last night I mixed a song that sounds alarmingly similar to a song I mixed the night before. Repetitiveness is a bummer.
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I also mixed this angry little ditty that is sort of maybe about Ferguson, MO although at the time of writing I had very little factual knowledge of the protests. I was just going on tweets from the scene and most of those were more emotional than factual.
The tail was sung off today. I made use of every non-work second and wrote and recorded six (6), that’s SIX vocals today. The song above is the first of those to be mixed, and the 19th song posted to the 50/90 page.
My head is spinning with all the progress I made today.
Actual, real live percussion. There’s a little monkey drum that I bought at a Ren Faire many years ago, and a pair of finger drums I bought at the Moroccan Pavilion at Epcot Center even more many years ago. It’s the first time since I had an actual real live band in a real studio that I have recorded actual real live percussion.
The lyrics are in first person, but it’s not about me. Some one close to me is being shown an alarming lack of respect at work. This is about that person’s situation.
The guitars are all Strat, and it’s my first time messing with the pitch shifter in GarageBand. Not sure I like the results. Next time I’ll go all Trevor Rabin and shift the leads up a minor seventh. Sah-Weet.
Inside the Red Head's Head 