Let's exapnd this blog, shall we?

If you've been reading, you know that the recent focus of this blog has been about my home recording adventures. But I've got other creative stuff going on, and I'm thinking maybe I should expand this blog to address some of that as well.

Quick home recording project update and then I'll get to the new stuff: I received the actual bass track for the third tune, "C'Mon" last week, but I've yet to start mixing what I have of the song. Maybe I'll do a little of that tonight; we'll see what I'm in the mood for (more on that in a moment.) I still need to do the guitar tracks for the one song I currently have the drums for that do not have any guitar tracks. If this Saturday day remains free, I hope to try and do it then. Also, me and Eric have scheduled a date (that we'll hopefully be able to keep) of November 16th to get together and get the drums down for the final four songs.

That's where we are with that right now. Now, for the expansion. I'd like to expand this blog to encompass whatever creative endeavours I'm currently working on, whether it be my demo recording project, and Pawnshop Diamonds stuff, or anything else. So let's get with some updates.

Pawnshop Diamonds - The demo recording is not the only recording project on the horizon. PD will be going into the studio in early December to do some recording as well. We're using Moontower studios in Cambridge, that came recommended by Eric and the Sun Lee Sunbeam from when 1) they recorded there, and 2) Eric was still with them. We (PD) researched a few studio options that we had discussed, and ended up deciding on that one. We felt it was a good combinaton of vibe, studio, and price. (And as a bonus to me, it's like ten minutes from my place.) Those three factors are important. Price because we're on a budget, obviously. We're trying to pay for as much of this as possible with moeny we've made from gigs. Moontower prices in at $35 an hour, which is a good price for a reputable studio and for what we plan to do. What I mean by "studio" above is the reputation of the studio and engineers, the acoustics of the recording rooms, along with the gear they have at their disposal. Basically anything that might be considered a technical consideration. And vibe, well that just means vibe. How comfortable does it feel. To give you an example, the two options we checked out before Moontower went like this:

Option 1: Good studio, bad vibe, same price.
Option 2: Bad studio, good vibe, better price. (By "bad", I don't mean bad so much, as it was a home studio with a lot less gear options. But it was with a guy we had worked with on our previous recording.)

Moontower just seemed to have the right combination of studio, price, and again most importantly vibe. I can't stress vibe enough. The more comfortable you are in your surroundings, the easier it will be to be productive and efficent. When I'm recording home demos, that doesn't matter because I'm not shelling out $35 an hour for it. When money is part of the equation, a bad vibe can make for a worse experience.

Anyway, we're going in for our first two days on December 6th and 7th. We are prepping six songs to record. Our plan is to go in with a best case scenario of getting all six done, but at the very least getting four. We are hoping to get all our basic tracking done in those first two days, and then spend somewhere between another 1-2 days for final touchups, rough mixing, and final mixing.

There is infinitely more stress involved with the PD recording. Part of it is the money aspect, of course. Being on the clock adds a whole new aspect in the form of performance anxiety. You mess up a guitar part and have to redo it, in the back of your head you know that just cost you $8 for another take.

Also, there is the matter of differences of opinions. While recording my demos, I'm receptive to the ideas that others might bring to the table, but since these are my songs entirely, the only final opinion that matters is mine. The buck stops here. In a band situation, it's not so much a buck than it is 20 cents. There have already been some debates as to the best way to go about this, but I think we finally came to an acceptable compromise this past week as to the procedure. I don't want to get too much into it now because, as it is, this blog already going to be long, but I will address it eventually. However, it appears that we have decided upon a course of action so that we can start preparing for studio recording.

Writing - Above I wrote that I might do some mixing tonight depending on what I was in the mood for. Let's talk about that. Some of you might know that throughout the years I've dabbled in some writing. Mostly short stories, and dabbled is the right word. When I get inspired and am in the mood for it, I do enjoy writing, but when I'm not inspired I tend to just drop it. I'm very inconsistent that way. Stephen King says that to be a writer you have to write EVERY DAY. So, by that logic I'm not a writer. But when inspired I will at least try it. And recently I have been inspired. I've had some ideas. If you've seen my Facebook status over the past couple days, it's read that I've had a shitload of inspiration and was looking to muster up a similar amount of motivation. That's what I was referring to. But I have a few writing projects I've been interested in pursuing recently, so while the inspiration is there I may try to get some of that done. The few things I have sitting on that particular creative stove are:

1) A short story. A few months back, I read through all the short storie/novel/screenplay ideas I've ever committed to any kind of electronic format. Anything that was saved on my computer or a disk. I have a ton of script ideas, novel ideas, character or plot points, beginnings of first chapters, and half-completed short stories lying around. And while re-reading them, I was pleasantly surprised that they didn't all suck. There was one in particular that I was fairly impressed by my writing. Unfortunately it's only a couple pages long and I can't remember what the point of the story was, so essentially all I have is one good scene and a title, "The Other Girl", that I'm hoping will eventually spark my memory as to what the story was supposed to be about. So I started thinking on the idea of trying to work on some of these stories. A couple months back, I did actually complete a first and second draft of a short story called "Appetite". I chose to start with that one, not because it was the best of the lot, but because I felt it would be the easiest to finish. It came out OK. And now, I've discovered another one that has seemed to be calling to me to work on it. It was titled "Snow Story", which is not the actual title, but just a working name I gave it. Over the past couple weeks I've sat down a few times, revised a little of what I had already, and fleshed out the story a little more. I felt it was missing something to be a complete story, but I think just earlier this week I may have figured out what that final piece was. So that's one thing that might get some work.

2) A zombie movie script. This actually started as a short story. I actually did complete a version of the story a few years ago. But it was an incomplete complete. That is, the sotry was very one dimensional, it didn't go anywhere. It was more a situation than a story. I rediscovered the short story when rediscovering all the rest mentioned in the paragraoh above, and while I realized the short story itself wasn't very good, it's central conceit was. So I thought about how to expand it, and drew inspiration from another book I had (at the time) recently read. I don't want to go into details here on the internet---you know, protecting intellectual property and such---but if anyone's interested, I can tell you the story idea in person. I actually sat down a week or so back and started this one. I wrote a scene or two just to see how it would feel and, aside from the specifics of writing in screenplay format, it was OK.

3) A christmas story. I was thinking last week about my blogs on Myspace, the ones I try to make a little more entertaining. Somehow I started toying around with the idea of writing some kind of 12 part blog, based around the idea of the 12 Days Of Christmas. The idea was to write 12 blogs on 12 days in a row, culminating on Christmas day. I started trying to come up with ideas. 12 Christmas related blogs? 12 blogs about the 12 lines in the 12 Days Of Christmas song? Nothing was really inspiring me. Then I thought: what about a Christmas-based story cut up into 12 parts, like a serial? That idea I liked. The problem now is developing a story. I do have an idea but it 1) needs work and 2) needs to be something that can be broken up into 12 parts. That's a kind of planning I've not yet used in writing a short story. What I've done so far is to take 12 index cards and number them 1-12. That's it. Like I said, I do have an idea, but an idea is not a story and still needs to be developed. That's what I'm kind of working on now. I'm trying to figure out the story particulars, and then I'll need to figure out if I can divide it the way I want. So, based on the time frame and the fact that I am a less than prodigious writer, this may not happen in time. However, the basic story idea I do like, so whether I get it done by Christmas or not, hopefully I will get it done eventually. Again, I don't want to go into too many details, but it centers around a murder at the North Pole, at Santa's workshop.

4) A short animated movie. A bunch of years ago, my dad owned Yanni's "Live At The Acropolis". So I borrowed it and listened to it a few times. For new-age crap it's not half bad. But there was one song on there that just grabbed my imagination. It has a very cinematic quality and I started picturing movie scenes over it. I essentially put together a little narrative to a pre-exisitng soundtrack. Needless to say, the idea is a little whacked, and I giggle everytime I think of it. This idea has been with me for about 10 years or so, so for 10 years, every time I thought about this idea I've giggled. That's a good sign. The only thing that has prevented me from working on this before is the fact that for me to accomplish it on my own I would have needed to 1) write the script, 2) learn how to use Flash to make the movie, and 3) learn how to draw. The main problem here is that I have approximately 2% aptitude for drawing. So this idea has always been consigned to the "What Could've Been" bin. Until recently. I started thinking that why don't I at least write the script? Just do that. Maybe then I could find someone to collaborate with on the actual animation part. I don't know if I'd be able to find that person, but I figured what the hell, I would at least try and complete the script for it. I've sat down the past few nights and pounded out a little bit of it. It hasn't been easy, because like I mentioned above, it's a pre-existing soundtrack, and while the general idea runs pretty easily in my head, getting the specifics to sycnh up with the music entails a lot more work. For anyone interested in the technical aspect of how I'm writing it: I'm using an Excel spreadsheet with two columns. One column has the time cues, and a corresponding column has the action that begins/occurs at that time cue. I would love, love, LOVE to see a finished product of this that comes close to matching what's in my head, but I'll worry about that later. At least I've finally taken the first step. As a note on this, I don't actually own any Yanni, so I had to turn to my friend, bit torrent, to acquire the song. There are two versions: the live version I had previously heard, and the original album version. I wanted to check out the original version, beacuse the live version 1) was part of a medley, and 2) has applause at the end, which I don't want. The only way for me to get the album version, unfortunately, was to download a torrent that had the ENTIRE YANNI CATALOGUE! Yep, I've got every Yanni album on my computer now. All for one song. And one song I didn't even end up using. As it turned out the live version was still better. So I threw the mp3 of that in my Nuendo recording software and cut off the beginning part of the medley, which was a different song, and the applause at the end.

Anyway, that's the massive update. The music stuff will happen, no worries there. Hopefully I can keep up with the writing stuff, at least long enough to get some of this stuff done.

Update - Now With Pictures

I now have the guitars done for one more song. About a week and half ago, I sat down and recorded the acoustic guitar tracks. Three of them. Here's what I did: I plugged the guitar pickup into one input, I placed a mic close up to where the neck meets the body and made that the second input, and then I put a room mic about six feet up and pointed it straight down at the guitar for the third input. The great thing about this configuration is that I now have three tracks of acoustic guitar to either blend together or discard as I choose to get a sound I like, and I only had to record them once.

The following weekend I sat down and recorded the electric guitar parts for the song, four of them. So yeah, now there are seven tracks of guitar going on in this song right now. But to be fair, they're layered. The four electric parts are as follows: 1) Clean electric that plays throughout the entire song (but will disappear into the mix later in the song, 2) A crunch rhythm guitar that shows up in the second chorus and plays through to the end, 3) A "solo" that I would more call a lead break, and that shows up twice, and 4) A brief slide part that shows up only in the second verse (although I did record it for the first verse as well, I don't think I'm going to use it there.)
And I may say that the slide part gives is one of those parts that gives me the musical boner. You musicians know what I'm talking about: those parts that you write and when you hear it, you just say, "Yeah!" One of those.

And now for some pictures:

Eric's living room for a typical drum recording session:


Eric, ready to lay down some fat beats:

Set up for recording acoustic guitar in my room:


And now for some electric rockin':

September Update

Things have been going rather slowly, but I finally have an update again.

With reference to the clipping issue mentioned two posts back, it turns out it was on the bass drum tracks for all three songs. So I've gone in and cleaned up all three. Each instance was a night's work. In this case, that means roughly about an hour to and hour and a half. Not a huge amount of time, but it's tiring work---peering at waveforms, making sure you cut out just enough and not too much, relistening to every cut to make sure it was OK. You really only could do one song a night. Thankfully there were only three, for now. But they're all done and ready to go now.

I received the bass track for the second of the three songs from one of my online buddies, Joe. He's the guy that's working on all three of the initially recorded songs. He's sent me his idea for the third track, I made one or two comments, and now am just waiting for the finished track back. I've been a little busy myself and not had much time to work on the mixing of what I do have, but just earlier this week I did manage to sit down and and actually get some mixing started.

Let me back up a second. The three songs I've recorded so far have titles, which means I have lyrics ideas for them. Whether or not those lyrics/titles end up getting used remains to be seen, but for ease of differentiating I will call them by their current names here: No Bargain, Woman, and C'Mon. C'Mon is the song I'm still waiting for the bass track. No Bargain I'm holding off on the mixing for now because I'm trying to decide what to do for a second harmonic part. I have the main rhythm guitar part set, and am trying to figure out what to do with a second part, if it even needs one. At this time, I've recorded a second electric guitar part. I also want to record an acoustic guitar part and want to hear a keyboard part (which also will be recorded by Joe, likely). Now I will only use one of those parts potentially, and possibly not even, but I do want to hear some choices before I go much further on that song.

That left Woman, and that's the song I mixed some the other night. I've got a decent mix so far, although I wish I could get a better kick drum sound. But I'm doing what I can with the gear and experience I have. My thought, based on that one night of mixing is that these songs will probably come out sounding better than I had expected but not as good as I'd hoped. Not a terrible place to be, and hopefully it will motivate me to to work harder on it and get it sounding even better.

As to further recording, I was able to get together with Eric this past weekend and get the drums down for two more tunes: Untitled 2 and Late Night Phone Call. LNPC almost certainly will not be the title, because I no longer like any of the lyrics I had for that. We were hoping to do three but....

I got down to Eric's at 1pm on Sunday, took about an hour to set everything up, get the drum levels, and we're ready to go! Hey, where's my guitar? Oh yeah, it's at home. DOH! So we lost an hour as I drove to my rehearsal space (which was closer than my apartment) and grabbed a guitar from there. But we got two of the three songs done which ain't bad. Of course, now I'll have to see if the clicking/clipping issue is there as well. I haven't yet because I'm dreading the possibility of having to spend two more nights cleaning up tracks.

But that will also give me something else to do, because I now need to record the guitars for those two songs and start farming them out for bass tracks. I may have someone else from online lined up, but that will be for a couple weeks away. One of the tracks has some acoustic guitar in it, so I can possibly do that during the week. But the electric guitar stuff will have to wait until a weekend, as I like to record at least a little loud, and figure a weekend day recording will be less obtrusive to my landlord and upstairs neighbors than a weeknight of loud, crunchy rocking.

So where does that leave me going forward? Out of the initial 9 songs I had, 5 now have drums. 3 of them I had intended to do with a couple other guys online, but these two sessions with Eric are leading me to believe that this might not be feasible. Although we have been able to get some decent tracks recorded, it is less than an ideal situation, and out of the choices I have for recording a drums set, it is even more ideal than most. So I presented Eric with the idea of having him do all the remaining tracks, and he seemed interested. However, based on his schedule it might not be until November. As such, I'm revising my schedule for other aspects a little bit. I had wanted to get all the basic tracks recorded for all the songs before soliciting vocals from people, but I may not wait now. If I get the 5 tracks I have drums for now fully recorded with the other parts and somewhat mixed, I'll probably start asking around sooner.

Hopefully more updates will follow sooner rather than later.