Captain's log #42
I keep surprising myself at how incapable I am to foresee how long will
things take. For today's session, I intended to record the
"reinforcement" guitar track, plus the keyboard -just a few ambient
notes here and there, so no big deal-. And I felt a bit guilty for
cutting myself too much slack doing only those two things.
Yeah right. It's turned out the guitar track has grown on its extremes two solos, which inhabit the gaps between words in the vocals, and logically they have taken some time to adjust.
The song already had a solo, and heaven knows I'm by design very sparse arrangement-wise in my songs -sometimes too much for my own good-. In this case it's like the solos have found me, rather than the other way round.
To compose them I've naturally turned to this technique I've used several times before of recording myself time after time, then listening and keeping the "hints": discoveries, unexpected vibes... A couple of mistakes have turned into intervals that I wouldn't have come up by myself, and I'm very happy with the way the solo flows. It reminds me a bit of the style of some Black Sabbath's ballads, Tony Martin era.
Despite having a comfortable process to record the solo, it has been tiring; about 3 hours of concentrated work, that you could not leave halfway through; besides, listening to the song so many times has also exhausted me emotionally. It's a very very sad song, that connects a lot with my personal situation; but in these arenas, sadness is also good, it's like crying at the movies, a harmless way of putting things out there, it liberates you...
With such a feat, today would be a happy day oh happy day, but some technical BS has started to creep in with the complexity. I resist to mention it here, I'll try to take it out of the way for good before the next log. Let's be careful, not overcook, we're almost there.
Yeah right. It's turned out the guitar track has grown on its extremes two solos, which inhabit the gaps between words in the vocals, and logically they have taken some time to adjust.
The song already had a solo, and heaven knows I'm by design very sparse arrangement-wise in my songs -sometimes too much for my own good-. In this case it's like the solos have found me, rather than the other way round.
To compose them I've naturally turned to this technique I've used several times before of recording myself time after time, then listening and keeping the "hints": discoveries, unexpected vibes... A couple of mistakes have turned into intervals that I wouldn't have come up by myself, and I'm very happy with the way the solo flows. It reminds me a bit of the style of some Black Sabbath's ballads, Tony Martin era.
Despite having a comfortable process to record the solo, it has been tiring; about 3 hours of concentrated work, that you could not leave halfway through; besides, listening to the song so many times has also exhausted me emotionally. It's a very very sad song, that connects a lot with my personal situation; but in these arenas, sadness is also good, it's like crying at the movies, a harmless way of putting things out there, it liberates you...
With such a feat, today would be a happy day oh happy day, but some technical BS has started to creep in with the complexity. I resist to mention it here, I'll try to take it out of the way for good before the next log. Let's be careful, not overcook, we're almost there.
