It's been great therapy for getting through the loss of my father. It put me in a place where making music is just a part of going through my day, and it totally replaced craft and analysis with an edit-less and expressive creativity.
It also filled the songs with life. Birds, water, cicadas, children...welcome additions, all.
I don't know what all this is going to look like, yet, but here's what I have so far.
About 1/3 of the tracks for this song were recorded during a family hiking trip. You can really hear the surroundings on the snippet that comes in at the end of the track.
I recorded the ringing rhythm that drives this song when I took my kids to the park. That hollow metal playground stuff they use now sounds fantastic when you slap it. Everything else fell together from there.
This was supposed to be my entry for the final round of the covers tournament, which obviously never happened. I played everything on it...acoustic guitar, lunch box banjo (with cigar box amp), bass, broom, piano, and vibraphone.
A lot of songs, you have to build them and refine them. Others, they just come out and they feel like they've always been there. This one's always been there.
It's always fun to get to work with talented people...it's also a shit ton of work. The four people involved in this track now live in four different states. So it goes.
This song has the sort-of gift of being recorded live, all at once. I say 'sort of,' because we had to put multiple parts together as they went into the computer, to keep it from lagging and skipping. This left it all feeling a bit like 1960's recording...play it through, and what you send in is what you get. Cool, yeah, but now I can't dial down the echo on the voice.
This was a song that I started about 4 years ago, and never finished. Grabbed a few people about 6 months ago and we finished it played the additional parts over the original guitar-and-vocal demo. All we had for percussion was a tambourine, so the "kick drum" sound is just the drummer stomping on a wood floor in boots, mic'd with a D112. It picked up a lot of the bass sound, too, so I'm left with the choice of having it be way bass-heavy on frequency boosting systems or having the kick almost disappear. I choose to keep the kick.
Last edited by McParadigm on Wed July 31, 2013 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Demo: I Will Look for You in the Dream
Preview clip:
Recorded this about a month ago...it's just a demo, but I'm a long ways away from having the time to finish writing and start thinking about the sound.
If Down represents one extreme in my auditory endeavors, Human Face plays up to the other. A bunch of cheap mics placed around my living room, feeding into a decades-old 4 track tape machine...shuffling guitars and dancing marimbas, yelping until my voice gives out near the end. We had a lot of fun...like Down, though, it really makes me miss the days of gathering a bunch of musicians together to just see what we could make.
We recorded this a huge number of times, and this was the only time we ever managed to keep it delicate while still creating a sense of build. It's a lot harder than it sounds. The downside is that my lyric sheet falls right near the end of the first verse (it's very audible), and I didn't remember any of the lyrics for the second verse. I just went ahead and made stuff up as I went, thinking that this had just become a deletable rehearsal, and it ended up being the best sounding take by a mile. Fuck.
About once a year, I get the itch to make a quick little record on my 4 track. I burn a few copies, hand them around, and forget all about it. But on the rare occasion I go back and listen I often find myself getting oddly sentimental about what I hear.
Good stuff, the production is really good as Self said and all the songs I listened to were interesting, which is of course, important. Nice touch on the guitar man, very clean playing for the most part!
*edit* Down might be my favorite that I've listened to.
Last edited by TheDapperGent on Fri May 17, 2013 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cheers dude. Some nice tunes there. I really like Nonsense. It's got a frailty/fragility that is so hard to capture. I also like that vocal delivery a lot. Good job.
This has been a different thing for me, in that a lot of these songs were started as much as two years ago and are just finally getting finished. That level of reflection involved can be...defining, I guess. It's made me realize that sometimes I'm more honest in song than I can hope to be in real life.
All of my life,
I'm praying for
the ability to create
change you can't ignore.
-
Quiet in regard, and forward in retreat.
-
Where do you go?
How do you escape?
We all need those little moments to pretend that we are safe.
-
Haunt the quiet road,
hear devotion bloom,
and they'll take the one in trade,
so always carry two.
But when you're on your own,
and you're holding on,
keep holding on.
I'll happily admit to being unhealthily reserved. I know it, I just can't change to correct. I'll give you an example...a few months ago, my father was diagnosed with omental mesothelioma. He underwent a surgery that involved intense chemo, the removal of every non-essential internal organ (including some essentials that he happened to have two of), and a resectioning of his colon and stomach. I have a complicated relationship with my father (who doesn't...), the end result of which is that he 'needs' me more as a friend than anything else, and we have often been exactly that...so he spent much of the time leading up to the surgery calling and Skyping me to weep openly and talk about his feelings on death. Then, he came through the surgery with a great prognosis but was changed...withdrawn, tired, bitter, and suddenly wanted nothing to do with much of anything (including me) at all. He's barely spoken to me in months.
The point is this: I have now told you significantly more about that than I have told any of my friends or coworkers. Most of them, I haven't even told my dad had cancer. When I took time off on my birthday to go up and see him in the hospital (the timing was coincidental...the man has never remembered a birthday in his life, and that would be a strange time to start prioritizing such things), I called my boss and told him I had the flu. When I couldn't catch a movie with a friend because I was waiting to hear how the surgery went, I just said that I already had plans for that night. In all honesty, I'll probably never tell most of them. Hell, the entire time it was going on I was posting stupid shit on this board, cracking stupid jokes, and even in the ultimate depersonalized environment I never felt comfortable talking about what was happening. Maybe it's a little easier in a thread like this, where only a handful of people will see it...it's like writing a diary entry.
I doubt I could guess how many times people have politely asked how I'm doing, or what's new, the last six months...I'll probably never know how to say anything other than "fine." But sit me down with an instrument, and give me five minutes, and I start writing I Will Look for You in the Dream....trying to tell my father and the world that I understand, I'm not mad, and, if necessary, goodbye.
I put this up on here a few years back, but kept it off the "records" I was making at the time. Typical me, I never said a word about Breanna to anybody other than my wife, in "real" life.
This is probably the very last time I ever played it, actually. I had recorded it once before, a few months earlier, and it was just terrible. I'd tried too hard to detach and focus on performance, is what ruined it. This particular take, though...the main vocal and the guitar...are actually just me running through it during a rehearsal after my bassist noticed a lyric sheet and asked if we could do "something with that." I gave him a run through of the song, which is what you have here, and it turned out....well, like I said, I don't think I ever played it again. Take my sinking ship, and tear right through.
It's always fun to get to work with talented people...it's also a shit ton of work. The four people involved in this track now live in four different states. So it goes.
This song has the sort-of gift of being recorded live, all at once. I say 'sort of,' because we had to put multiple parts together as they went into the computer, to keep it from lagging and skipping. This left it all feeling a bit like 1960's recording...play it through, and what you send in is what you get. Cool, yeah, but now I can't dial down the echo on the voice.
violin
Vitalogist wrote:As a hotel manager, you can imagine the amount of beige I’ve seen in my career.
Claire was a gift, no question. But, in retrospect, it's remarkable how much space the rhythm section on that song developed for her during rehearsals without knowing that she was even a possibility.
The guy playing drums on this (and a lot of my stuff), Dan, is currently dating her. Good on him.
That song, more than anything I've ever recorded, makes me shake my head in awe. How do you end up with a collection of players who are that practiced, that talented, and that creative...and all of them willing to spend long hours working on something YOU wrote?
Nobody is playing the norm, here, or phoning it in...Claire is in some crazy mourning trance, stretching notes out forever without elongating them for even a second....Daniel is somewhere between a Hazy Shade of Winter and a Spring's thunderstorm rumble...and Sam is rolling around his 5 string fretless monster playing chords (on a bass) that trumpet each oncoming chorus and darken the lightest moods. Everybody...everybody...is in it to win it. Jesus Christ. Who is charging me for this? That kind of shit happens when skinny kids form bands, you know? And, sometimes (but not always), when established artists record with great talent. Here I am, not deserving it, getting so many special moments that I did nothing to develop. "Uh...play a B-flat. Now an F. Good. Here we go." Pfft.
Time and chance have given me memory beyond reason, and each one worth keeping.
But sometimes, when nobody can hear, I let myself take the credit...if only for just a moment.
McParadigm wrote:Who is charging me for this? That kind of shit happens when skinny kids form bands, you know? And, sometimes (but not always), when established artists record with great talent. Here I am, not deserving it, getting so many special moments that I did nothing to develop. "Uh...play a B-flat. Now an F. Good. Here we go." Pfft.
McParadigm wrote:Apparently, that's what songs are to me.
...and you to them.
your songs are beautiful. They are deserving of that kind of attention because they are.
Vitalogist wrote:As a hotel manager, you can imagine the amount of beige I’ve seen in my career.
Self wrote:Every time I get to be a bachelor, I order Chinese. Twice a year, I gorge on broccoli 'n beef and crab rangoons. The guilt reminds me of masturbation. So does the rice.
I'm very glad to know somebody dug it. I really wanted to plant that one in the covers contest. In another life, I suppose.
what the fuck d'ya mean by that?
I hope you did that cowboy sniff thing after typing that question...the one where the lip pulls a Billy Idol curl and one eye winces. But if you skipped the spitting afterwards, I understand.
I put this up on here a few years back, but kept it off the "records" I was making at the time. Typical me, I never said a word about Breanna to anybody other than my wife, in "real" life.
This is probably the very last time I ever played it, actually. I had recorded it once before, a few months earlier, and it was just terrible. I'd tried too hard to detach and focus on performance, is what ruined it. This particular take, though...the main vocal and the guitar...are actually just me running through it during a rehearsal after my bassist noticed a lyric sheet and asked if we could do "something with that." I gave him a run through of the song, which is what you have here, and it turned out....well, like I said, I don't think I ever played it again. Take my sinking ship, and tear right through.
This one is still my favorite. I really love the little lull before the chorus kicks in and the weird-ass echoey vocal thing going on throughout. I also like how vulnerable your voice sounds. I'm a sucker for haunting and this really fits the bill.
Weirdly enough, I'm mostly busy working on very weird pieces right now, and this just sort of popped out....but I suppose lyrically it still fits in with what's upcoming.
Weirdly enough, I'm mostly busy working on very weird pieces right now, and this just sort of popped out....but I suppose lyrically it still fits in with what's upcoming.
