Four out of nine songs on the current re-recording list are now complete. I think this is the first one of these things that doesn’t live up to the original (which was from the 2012 RPM Challenge and sounds like a dog turd). I lost something here and I’m not sure what.
The drums at the very beginning… if you speed up the tempo, is it “I Feel Fine”? I think it is but I’m too embarrassed at my possible theft to go and listen to find out for sure.
It’s a good thing I never got a job as a recording engineer. I suck.
I had two songs left to sing for the second round of re-dos. The two songs are probably the shoutiest little bastards I’ve ever done and like a moron I saved them both for last.
As I’m getting to the last shouty bit on the first song I started to notice a weird little overtone type thing in my headphones. At first I thought it was a stray noise picked up by the mic, but it wasn’t. I thought maybe something weird was happening in my throat. I could hear it through the mic but I couldn’t hear it without the mic. I had my output levels up really high, and I was listening through an ancient pair of Apple ear buds (pre-lightning cable). I chalked it up to a little output noise and carried on.
The second song has a lot more shouting than the first, and the noise was getting worse and worse. By the time I was wrapping up the second song I couldn’t stand it anymore and I started ripping things apart looking for the cause.
What was it? It was LITERALLY the first thing I should have checked. I was peaking the input level on the audio interface. SON OF A !!!!!!!
I deleted everything on song #2 and did it all again. I deleted the shouty parts of song #1 and did them again. Then I deleted all of the non-shouty parts of song #1 and did those again too so that everything would be at a consistent level.
I suck at my job. Period.
Last night I said the pics I took of my guitar were better than the guitar playing. Today they are about even, maybe.
I worked on four songs. Three of them are new. I wasn’t going to do an album in a month this month as I was going to dedicate the whole time to The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project. Instead I started messing with some lame little proggie ideas. I’m thinking I could sneak in five of them by Halloween and call it a half an album in a month. Something like that.
The pics are better than the playing tonight.
Three songs down, six to go. The Great 2015 Re-recording thingie continues. I wonder if the audio file will embed this time… Let’s find out, shall we?
Why didn’t the audio file I added to the post last night work? The one from the night before worked, but not the one from last night. Why?
I tried re-adding it a couple of times, but nothing. I tried adding it to a new post, nothing. I tried adding it and the song from the night before to another new post and the older song worked. Weird. I don’t know what I did.
I just re-uploaded it to the site. Does it work now?
Just in case you were wondering if I owned a wah wah pedal or not. Once again, I’m not sure about the mix here. What I need to do is line up all of these suckers in a play list and then drive somewhere that’s 2-3 hours away. Listening to mixes in the car is pretty much the source of truth for the entire recording industry. I’m actually a little bit serious here.
The first song from Quarantine Tunes Volume 2 is done! Hooray, babie!
Back in 2016 I wrote a bunch of songs for the RPM Challenge that questioned the mental abilities of flat Earthers. Someone listening commented that I was being closed minded. Really. This song was my subtle response.
I’m not sure I have the mix just right. There are four tracks of rhythm guitar and I was worried I’d get carried away and overpower everything else. I wonder if I over compensated by backing them off too much. I’ll listen back in a couple of days and decide.
One down, eight to go.
It’s October 13th. Happy (I mean that sarcastically) Seventh Covid-Quarantine Monthiversary.
This fucking sucks.
Last night one of the guys in the band floated the idea of having a mask-wearing, spread out all over the room band practice. Another guy immediately said yes. The third guy commented but didn’t say yes or no. Then I was the asshole. I’m really tired of being the asshole. Like… really tired of it.
I was going to mix one of the songs last night. I replaced all the bass and drum parts and made sure everything lined up correctly. There was one spot toward the end of the song where the vocals sounded weird. I had two tracks singing the same thing. I’m not sure why I did that, but I did it for the first three songs I recorded. In this particular instance there was a drop out that cut a whole word out of one of the takes. How did I miss that?
I listened to just the vocal tracks, one at a time, and there were little drop outs all over the place. What the hell? I was mostly able to comp together one full track out of the two that I had, but there was one line where both tracks had a drop out. Fortunately it was in a chorus so I was able to fly in that line from another part of the song.
It really pissed me off though. How did I miss that when I was in the car? I knew I was having signal loss issues that day but I thought I was catching them as they happened. I’m so mad at myself. I did the same thing with the two other songs I recorded that day and they both had a drop out or two, but they weren’t nearly as bad. I comped together a full take pretty easily. I then did the same for the four songs I recorded yesterday, when I wasn’t doubling tracks, and everything was fine. I don’t have to redo anything, but it still pissed me off like crazy.
I also had my first bad news on the exercise front, though it wasn’t unexpected. When I started this I said I was going to do the intermittent fasting and 30 minutes of exercise each day and see what happens. I explicitly said I was not going to screw with what I ate, just when I ate it. I have been weighing myself every Tuesday morning and I was losing weight. Today was the first weigh in where I was up. Only a pound and a half, but I was not happy. Not even a little bit. I told myself that weight loss wasn’t my primary goal, but now that I’m up a pound and a half I think I have to face the reality that maybe it actually is my primary goal. Crap. I thought I was more evolved than that (that’s a joke, I didn’t really think that).
The good news is, last time I cut the grass I would do about 10 minutes of mowing and then have to sit for half an hour to recover. After a month’s worth of multiple little “work outs” each day, when I cut the grass this weekend it was more like 20-30 minutes of mowing with little 5-10 minute breaks to recover. That was my original goal for all of this shit. I consider that a small success in an otherwise garbage universe.
Kiss my ass, Covid-19.
