We came back to the hotel a little early tonight. Both kids wanted to stay up late. I had all my pictures from the day sorted and uploaded. What to do? How about mix a song for 50/90?
The lyrics are about Patches the cat. Honestly.
Recorded in the USA, mixed in Canada. kewl
I really do need to get a life…
I’ve got this goofy idea for 50/90. I’ve got these three electric guitars, see? How about I use one guitar per day. I used my ES 335 on everything I worked on on Friday. I used the Strat for everything I did today. I plan on using the Les Paul tomorrow.
But there’s a hang up here. The Strat is just plain hard to play. I recorded three songs worth of leads today. One of them needs to be done again. The other two aren’t great, but they are okay. If I re-record them tomorrow, do I use the Strat, because the song is a Strat-day song, or do I use the Les Paul, because the tracks will be recorded on a Les Paul day. And how do acoustic guitars fit into the plan?
Like I said, I need a life.
I set out on June 1st to write and demo 10 songs. When June ended I had 10 complete songs and three more that were still incomplete. As of this moment, all three of the extras have been recorded. One has been mixed, I posted it the other night. The other two had vocals recorded yesterday and today. One of them is in three separate parts but will still probably be only five or six minutes long. No prog masterpieces here. The other one is just a little thing for 12-string and vocal. Nothing complicated. If I can mix them tonight, then I’ll have a clean slate for the start of 50/90 tomorrow.
I keep talking about the left over song from May that I was adding to the pile of June songs. Here it is. Just a dopy little 12-bar blues that was really just an excuse to write something on my new Strat. In the end, it’s kind of a fun little groove.
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Here is the iOS mix.
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.
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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For comparison, here is the iPad mix (again)…
Did I just record the last guitar part for June?
I think I’m down to just vocals.
Weird.
The plan for June was 10 songs with all of the guitar parts played on the Strat.
That will still happen, but…
There will be two additional songs. One is a three part suite type thing. It uses my lovely Takamine 12-string and my magical Gibson ES 335. The other song is all 12-string right now, but it’ll probably get some Strat later.
Here’s to musically biting off more than you can chew! 50/90 is two weeks away!
Inside the Red Head's Head 