Minutiae

Jacques came over for a little bit yesterday. We worked a little on mixing "Death Blow." Actually, first we tried out an idea of mine, running the song through some filters to add some brightness on extra tracks. Don't think it was as successful as I'd hoped, however. But then he had to go to dinner and after he left I realized my neighbors weren't home. It was now or never to get crackin' on my LAST solo album (fake sci-fi soundtrack) song idea. I recorded it all in a rush and as I was going I was thinking it wasn't sounding so great, but by the time I got the last tracks recorded it was coming together pretty alright. There's some sloppy playing all around, but I think I covered it up okay for the most part. I rush to set the drums up first (didn't even set 'em up completely), threw some mics on 'em and ran through a bunch of really sloppy false starts before I settled on something. Threw the bass down in a hurry (and my bass is still messed up, the output cuts out constantly, but I managed to get through it sitting down). The tone I ended up getting recorded on the bass is pretty bad, but I got something salvageable with eq-ing. Then I did the guitar. Again, in a hurry. I broke a string on the last take I recorded so I figured, that's that! Then I threw down some SK-1 through filters, I think maybe the filters were a bit overboard, but that's okay, whatever. Then I threw some Minimoog over it all and that's when it all came together, I think. Well, that was a lengthy and boring description. Anyway, in spite of all the mess of it, I ended up being pretty proud of it. And now the damn album thing is COMPLETE. I may go back and remix it, I did that in a hurry too and I think I could make a slightly cleaner go at it. Jacques's dinner plans had ended and he came back over and we worked on mixing "Death Blow." Well, he was unhappy with one word on the vocals not coming across twice: "you." So we had a few abortive attempts at either cutting and pasting a "you" from earlier in the song and then punching in the word, but it didn't sound right so we scrapped it. Then we mixed it. Jacques thinks the samples might be too loud and the synth on the rockin' part might be too loud. We'll probably do it again later. Well, that's that. Here's my song, "Prog Intro":