Thank You, Unions and Labor Movement

Jacques came over yesterday and we worked on the soundtrack. We set to worn on the rap track (that, again, someone else will be rapping on). We already had the main hunk of it that Paul had brought in earlier. We set to adding drum sounds. First was the bass drum. I recorded a sample of a sound I built up in the Taurus and ran through the Big Muff (to get a boomy overdriven bass sound). That ended up being too boomy with too much sustain (which was my original idea, but it didn't quite work with Paul's tracks as they're pretty busy and the bass is kinda close and it clashed when the "bass drum" held onto the notes too long) so I faded out the sample and left more space. We also needed more punch so I recorded myself hitting the strings of a bass to get an attack to attach to the beginning. It kinda worked but we needed something heavier so I stuck the recorded inside the bass drum and stepped on the pedal as hard as I could. That got a really goddamn powerful sound (actually had to try it three times 'cuz it peaked the recorder so much, had to keep pulling down the level on the recorder). Anyway, with all that frankensteined together we had a pretty awesome bass drum sound. For the snare sound, I just googled "cheesy rap snare sample" and got something that worked really well. Jacques started tapping out a hi-hat rhythm so I thought we'd just record him playing it. I miced the hi-hat and ran it into the instrument interface and ran the sound into the Polivoks filter (band pass, for once) and hooked up a gated envelope. Well, as I was in the same room with the hi-hat being played and could only monitor out of one headphone channel, it was hard to get the threshold for the gate right so it sometimes triggered in extra places (actually, in hindsight I probably should have used the envelope output instead of the gate, live and learn, eh). What Jacques had in mind was something along the lines of Memphis rap, what we ended up with sounded a bit more like Autechre, but we liked it so we're gonna make it work. Word back on the other songs, the ambient one is perfect as is, the reggae one is good but the "horn" part is too loud and cuts through everything else, and he can still hear the "haunted house" effect on "Blood of Destruction" even with the guitar solo over it. So I'll have to completely remix that intro with the effect left out. Also, yesterday I took another lazy approach to the reggae song and just added some lo-pass filter over the parts of the song that have the "horn" in them (not a whole lot) in audacity. This may work since it's just supposed to be background music. It's not super jarring even just listening to it (I mean, of course you can tell that the sound changes). If that doesn't work I guess I'll have to remix the whole thing, bleh. Okay. Moving along. In non-boring-song-recording-related news, last night Mary Beth and I started in on Mr. Robot and it's really good so far. Yeah! Now today is Labor Day, woohoo!