Musician Diaries

Tangled in intestines. Yesterday I went to bed confused and a bit concerned. I think the main cause was because when the shit hit the fan I wasn't fresh. I had mastered "Coming back" and uploaded it, and then took some time to decide what to do next between two options. On one hand, I thought to master "Murder Christmas", the other impromptus song for the album;  it would get me a new cheap win, with a new song ready to go in one sitting. But as those impromptus songs don't have (logically) the same recording quality as the full fledged stuff, I was afraid that it could bring me down, plus, I just came from doing some mastering and didn't feel like starting another cycle. Discarding other songs that no way I felt like getting into, the other option was "Now you're talking". This song got interrupted halfway the recording stage by the big breakdown. In fact, I was still able to advance a bit on the drums with computer B; but the...

Finished (abandoned) "Coming back" mixing. Today I'll apply the mastering process and be done with it. I've erred too far into production tasks (which tire me and depress me), and it's been a while since I entered the land of diminishing returns. It seems there's no way around with the vocals track; if you apply compression to tame the big initial push, you get too much shhhs and bohhhs. So after trying all kind of tricks, I just went back to my previous version and reduced manually the volume of some of the beginnings of phrase. In spite of this, overall I like the final result pretty much. Especially the moment when the solo enters. It's something my twentysomethings old self would have listened to with pleasure, cutting classes at the school campus while smoking the stuff he used to smoke back then... I'd like to publish the Black Sheep Riot album somewhere around October, and the Maple Dye one at some point in November. It would be a g...

Still working my way through "Coming back"'s vocals. The problem I have is that I have had to pile two compressors to keep the voice from sticking out too much, but that on its turn has caused the track to be under a "magnifying glass"; a lot of breath-ins that were hardly noticed before have had to be pruned, and the sibilances have become too prominent. So it's deesser time. I haven't used that plugin much, so I have to get familiar first. I guess it's just a compressor for chosen frequencies. Hopefully today I'll take that stuff out or find an alternative solution. The rest of the song is smooth sailing already. I'm going to stick to these logs until #10. They're working great for me by now -suffices to read my mood and my outcome in day #1 and now-. Still haven't had a "hangover" or lost the novelty halo, I like this routine...

99% sure "Coming back" is finished. Gotta relisten today. I got plenty of moments during the session where I though "aha, that's it, it matches what I had in mind". The main point of discomfort in this one is that the overall mix is a bit 2D, especially considering (or perhaps more noticeably because of)  that trill effect coming and going it has in the middle; I would have liked to give it more depth, but... I think that's a job for a professional producer; for me this one is an advance in the right direction, so I think I'll leave the table and cash my earnings now that I'm winning... Another positive surprise was how well tape saturation works in the song. I have used it in the past in several songs, and I had discarded it as a great creator of mess; maybe it's something that works in ballads only? Material for new experiments in the future.

Almost there with "Coming Back". The first part of the session went very well, everything flowed famously. It made me think of the Karate Kid movie, when Daniel san, sick and tired with so much "wax on, wax off", finally puts the training to use; Miyagi starts throwing punches at him, and his hands block the blows automatically, unconsciously; "the vocal track sounds too piercing at the beginning of the phrases?" That's because the compressor does not attack fast enough. "The guitar sounds as if it had a sponge stuck among the strings?". Let's open the EQ and chase those two or three suckers lingering in the middle range. "The solo sounds too 'telephonic'?". I've gone too far with the Low pass filter... But at the end was too tired, and I wish I had stopped about half an hour before I did. I still have to relisten, but I think at the end I couldn't trust my own judgement. I stopped before I 'fried...

After giving some thought to what to do next, I passed another song through the gorilla master process. 2 ready, 6 to go. This one was "You're Repulsive", an impromptu one that was already published, but needed some tweaking. This has made me realize that most of the material of this album has already been somewhat published, but hardly noticed, so... It surprised me how clear the bass sounded in this one. I think what I did different from Zombie was not using distortion; that was an experiment because I thought a distorted bass would cut better through the mix, etc... In this one the drums hardly qualify as such; they're just a loop on top of which everything gets played. But the song turned out well and it fits the mood of the collection, I think. I chose doing this one for morale purposes (getting one more song to done quickly is a boost, reducing inventory is great...), plus reinforcing the just created master process with a new iteration. After that,...

Relistened to the song, resisted the temptation to tweak "just a couple of things more", did my gorilla mastering process, then the property registration and uploaded the song to Bandcamp, plus lyrics. A lot in the song is wrong production-wise. Too wet in places, too raw in others... But the song, what matters in the end, is there. It has the fist and it has the feather, the two elements I always look for. The drums kill me, but fortunately here come cultural references to the rescue; Venom's first album sounded as if the band were playing somewhere and the drummer on a dance hall at the next room; yet the record works because the songs are so primal and dirty. In fact the crappy recording even adds to its creepiness, so who knows. It's always this struggle, I don't want to become sloppy, but there is an epidemic of technical disease going on and you have to remind it to yourself at each step. Music is life or death stuff, there's people out the...

Installed the window manager in the music distro (gave some troubles, but nothing serious, and I also documented it so from now on it will be easier). To cope with the yawn-ness of the whole thing, I structure things like this: "I'm going to do this wm thing, and then I'm going to do something that actually involves music". The premise was doing something that involved sound, creating it, editing it, recording it... When the moment came what I figured out was checking the session of the song I was mixing before the "great breakdown".  I chose this task because it only involves one program, the DAW, so configuration overheads are lower. What makes sketchy and strange the inventory I currently have is that, during the absence of computer A, I tried to stay committed and do what I could with computer B. That involved generally recording, which computer B could take, but not so much mixing, plugin stuff, etc... The song I left in the mixing process...

Not knowing where to start, today I applied the "begin with the end in mind" principle and created a Bandcamp draft for the upcoming album. I had the feeling I was accumulating a lot of resistance for not knowing what the "endgame" of the songs was going to be, and it seems I was right. As it often happens, I felt terribly lazy about going back to Bandcamp, (where did I put the password, etc...), but everything went smoothly. The first thing I wanted to check was if I could publish a "work in progress album", i.e., an "album" already available with only one song when I've finished it, where I can upload new songs as I finish them. This doesn't seem to be possible, but in any case I'm happy I've done the test. I had never done a Bandcamp draft and it seems a good practice. The project feels more real. I've uploaded a crappy cover version, the first .png I've found laying around, and I haven't even uploaded ...

Lately I've felt very far from music, even though I know, i always know, it's the best thing that's in me (bear in mind my interest in music started way before the accession of home computers, and it won't change a thing for me the day they become "the penultimate wonder"). I blame this distance on worries and stress. Life has squeezed me extremely these latest 4 months. Granted, my superpowers have also risen considerably (I'm in my forties, top of the hill baby!), but music, real music, is a delicate thing that needs a bit of buffer and comfort. I changed my computer recently and it's been an odyssey. After having things configured to my liking, the screen started to act weird, so I had to back up everything and start again after the attempt at repairing (useless attempt, for worse, as the technicians acted like in Monty Python's dead parrot sketch). Now I have a guitar laying around, a hard drive full of half finished songs and docu...

I have found my entertainment greatly enhanced since I started listening to podcasts. I love the direct approach of someone telling how he does his/her thing, sharing tips, or just "telling it like it is". I can no longer stomach for very long the traditional, grandiloquent TV news reports, where everything reeks of staging. I get a better worldview, I think, by listening to a diversity of podcasts, from areas that sometimes don't even have to do with my direct interests, but where I get indirect advice that I can later customize to my world, or simply I like the way the guys talk, the flow of the whole thing, the fun they're having together... Speaking however of my direct interests, music making in this case, I'd like to speak of a certain mentality I've encountered often in podcasts and blogs of the guild, a misapplication of terms that I find annoying and dangerous, and which I've refered to in other texts as "the technical disease...