Friday, February 13, 2009

[ RPM09: ] Day 11

It's a Thursday and thus one of my days off. Unfortunately I didn't get as much done as I'd like even though I woke up at 9am.

Yay, me.

I did revisit my 'upbeat' tune and really reworked the chorus. While I was at the school yesterday (meaning Wednesday) I came up with a different chord pattern that fist the song just a million times better. The former one... just went somewhere not right.

So I spent a bunch of time recording that.

I also spent some time putting down some layers of electric guitar. Wound up... I guess cross-splicing my first take and second take. Parts of the first take were a little more lead-ish here while my second take was more lead-ish there...

I'm beginning to recover some of my lead guitar skills. I'm no virtuoso but I was definitely feeling the flow better than ever. I didn't wind up recording much of that, though. It definitely needs to get in there, however - in between bits of the verse that's what's supposed to be going on.

But first I wanted to back and throw down a layer of mock vocals. I... I really need to warm up for this... LOL. The vocals aren't serious as usual. Just kinda wanted to get a rough idea.

Rough indeed... Whew!

But then, as I was listening, I had a sudden bit of inspiration. There's something about the way I was singing the chorus that reminded me vaguely of "Big Love" by Fleetwood Mac. So I threw down a four-part harmony which didn't really quite turn out as "uh... ah... uh... ah" but... *shrugs* Still like it.

I did indulge myself and worked on some mixing/production issues. There was just too much peaking and distortion going on so I threw some more EQ and compression into the gambit just for the sake of clarity.

Spent too long on that tho... *sighs*

After that I started futzing around with some electronic ideas. I really need to get back into how to use some of this new software for weird sounds and patterns. That's one area I've definitely been lagging in.

Pulled out a beat I'd been fucking around with in Reason. Messed it up a little more and then bounced it down as a sample. Pulled it into Live and, in a moment of goofiness, switched the tempo.

Suddenly it was kinda cool! Very digital distortion. The kick actually took on a pitch, too, which was very unexpected.

Started digging around my hard drives and found a couple other samples to use - the initial noise rhythm, for example. I also found a reversed guitar clip I'd discovered some ages ago and spliced that in. Dropped some of the beats to make it a tad more interesting...

Then I decided to check out the sampler tool. I... I'm a little lost. I've worked with some of the samplers in Reason but these... they just work differently. I did find a couple cool sounds that I'm using as extra bits of percussion.

It's okayish. I still need to figure out more shape, I think. But for the learning curve I guess it's decent.



    upbeat tune
  • draft 2 - more pr0n-tacular!

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