Captain's log #38
My plan for today was to finish real quick the redux-to-normal montage
of voice tracks, print the session, upload it to Bandcamp and listen to
the album I have so far, kinda like the painter who takes a step
backwards to watch the whole canvas. But I didn't get to Bandcamp
because housekeeping has caught up with me; there was some serious
tidying up needed after fighting the "guitar tone wars" of 2 weeks ago.
I didn't name consistently or usefully the guitar tracks then, so I've had to go through most of them to tell which one was which; for example, there was one called "g_vamp", as in "virtual amp". The reference was a good enough locator at that moment, with my brain more engaged in listening and experimenting, but, come to think of it, all my amps are virtual so, it hasn't been too eloquent later. Plus I still had laying around the guitar mockups of the demo stage, plus some of the tracks that were intended for experimentation turned out to be usable later, etc... Like the audio pros say, "It's all about preproduction, dude!".
What saddens me is that, although the song has turned out well, the process to get a good tone remains a bit vague, so the problems will reappear in next session: "record with different amp setups, layer them and hopefully you'll get it to sound good". If it were a chair I wouldn't sit on it.
And speaking of layering, I've found that, whenever I layer the different voice takes (a very common "reinforcing" trick) , the raspiness disappears and Paul Stanley makes a new visit. Strange, because this kind of layering has brought me good results in the past; I've also tried moving the tracks a bit to left or right, in case they were for some reason out of sync, but doesn't seem to be the case. I'll probably give it some more experimentation, but worse case scenario one vocal track will do.
Every day I hate perfectionism more and I want to move on from this song. I have to plan how to move faster from one song to the next. I would also like to balance my load so there is always something fun (singing, playing) compensating the boring bits (click, click...)
I didn't name consistently or usefully the guitar tracks then, so I've had to go through most of them to tell which one was which; for example, there was one called "g_vamp", as in "virtual amp". The reference was a good enough locator at that moment, with my brain more engaged in listening and experimenting, but, come to think of it, all my amps are virtual so, it hasn't been too eloquent later. Plus I still had laying around the guitar mockups of the demo stage, plus some of the tracks that were intended for experimentation turned out to be usable later, etc... Like the audio pros say, "It's all about preproduction, dude!".
What saddens me is that, although the song has turned out well, the process to get a good tone remains a bit vague, so the problems will reappear in next session: "record with different amp setups, layer them and hopefully you'll get it to sound good". If it were a chair I wouldn't sit on it.
And speaking of layering, I've found that, whenever I layer the different voice takes (a very common "reinforcing" trick) , the raspiness disappears and Paul Stanley makes a new visit. Strange, because this kind of layering has brought me good results in the past; I've also tried moving the tracks a bit to left or right, in case they were for some reason out of sync, but doesn't seem to be the case. I'll probably give it some more experimentation, but worse case scenario one vocal track will do.
Every day I hate perfectionism more and I want to move on from this song. I have to plan how to move faster from one song to the next. I would also like to balance my load so there is always something fun (singing, playing) compensating the boring bits (click, click...)
