Here’s another June song. Let’s just say that the day I recorded the lead guitar was not a particularly good day. As for the lyrics… well… it was raining that day. I don’t really know what any of the rest of it is about.
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And here is the iOS version.
Did I mention that I recently had an external hard drive die on me? Did I also mention that the uncompressed versions of both the March and April music thingies were on that now deceased external hard drive?
They were.
So I decided to take a break from the bad mixing of the bad music to upload the last two music projects to bandcamp.com. I had to take mp3’s from alonetone and uncompress those, which is about as useful as… well… nothing.
Anyway, the two playlists from bandcamp.com are on my Music page with all the other home demo collections. I’ll stick ’em here too just for fun.
Do not under any circumstances pay for any of the music I’ve posted to bandcamp.com. If you need a download, it’s all on alonetone. Download it from there for nothing. Although, why on Earth anyone would want to download any of this garbage is beyond me.
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.
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What do you think? Which version is better?
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.
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And here is 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.
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.
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!
Inside the Red Head's Head 