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.