Diary of a sex romp (part 4)

I was going to wait until tomorrow morning to write this, but I need to do something to divert my attention from the horribly bad film rendition of the Phantom of the Opera that I'm watching. I must be masochistic since I've yet to turn this off.

Anyway...

I sat down yesterday to record the bass and guitar for Woman. I started a little later than expected since I got the calll for "Emergency Brunch" over at Johnny D's. I don't know why it was an emergency, but brunch was certainly welcome to help nullify the massive hangover.

First things first. I turned on my amp and let the tubes warm up while I was getting the computer up and running and setting up the mics. With a tube amp, the warmer the tubes, the better the sound, so if possible it's always best to turn the amp on at least a few minutes before you going to use it.

I set two mics up on the amp. One one was close in near the speaker cone, a typical mic set up. The second was placed a few feet away, to get the room sound. I do this to get a "room" reverb. And there's also the extra added beenfit of being able to record two guitar tracks at one time. When I mix it later, I'll mix the two together to get the final sound.

All in all the tracking went pretty quickly, which is good because the amps was loud and my neighbors upstairs were probably praying for silence. After the guitars, I sat down and did the bass (with a bass borrowed from Dave.) The original bass line I had pictured in my head didn't actually fit when played with the guitar part. So I ended up with something simpler. Writing it out and playing it also didn't take that long and I got a surprisingly good bass sound being plugged staright in to the MOTU I/O.

After the bass, it was back to the guitar. This time for the solo. Also not written that the time of recording. I looped the solo section and practiced for a little while. Wrote it out in about 15 minutes, and started recording. I almost got in the first take, which would have been a record, but I messed up the VERY LAST NOTE! Argh!. That can often set a tone in recording that it's going to take a while to get something done, but luckily I got the solo in only 5 takes. Again, probably much to the relief of the upstairs neighbors.

All in all it was about 3 hours of recording to get everything done.

It looks like the vocals aren't going to be done before I leave for my trip. Unless I did them myslef, but I probably don't want to do that. I was hoping Matt could come by today and belt them out, but it didn't happen. Oh well, I still have a few lines of the lyrics to write anyway. But for the most paprt I got done what I wanted. Written to recorded in one week.