[sic]

Archive for July, 2010

Last weekend consisted of some of the best recording progress I’ve ever made.

A few weeks ago, I made a CD of all the bits and pieces of the songs I wanted to record for the upcoming album, and had them playing in my car so I could work on them while I did my hour’s worth of commuting every day. Some of these were guitar and drums recorded in Audacity four years ago, some were just guitar parts recorded hastily on my home studio, with no regard for song structure, levels, effects or percussion. While it did work in terms of keeping me motivated about working on them, it bothered me that they sounded so disjointed and uneven.

Last weekend, my goal was to get drums and guitar parts recorded for those 9 songs to a point that they all at least sounded close to how they will end up sounding, and get them mixed down to a new CD.

With one of them, which for now I’m calling  ‘Break Down’, while playing back the recorded rhythm track, I was idly playing along, and came up with what I thought was a pretty interesting sounding lazy lead part, so I put that down as well. I really liked the way it turned out, so I cut a little sample out of it for you guys to check out:

[audio:http://www.secretidentitycrisis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/breaksample.mp3|titles=Break Down – secret identity crisis]

After giving all these songs the quick and dirty once over, the goal now is to focus on one song at a time. That will start this weekend.

More to come.

[sic]

It’s been too long.

Needless to say, the whole RPM challenge did not pan out. I quickly learned that I didn’t have the recording experience nor the tools at my disposal to produce what I wanted to in such a short amount of time.

However, things are slowly but surely progressing toward an actual album being recorded.

A few months ago, my wife and I were wandering a mall, and she suggested we go into the music store just for the hell of it. I don’t usually like going into stores where I have no intention of purchasing anything, because then it’s just a torturous ordeal of staring at cool shiny things I can’t have.

After checking out said shiny things, I found the wall of home recording gear, and decided to see what was available.  Of course, one of the clerks noticed this, and came over to give me his opinion, and attempt to sell me on something.

Which he did.

With my wife’s ever-supportive blessing, I walked out of there with a digital home recording studio, a condenser mic, headphones, and a set of professional studio monitors. About $1000 worth of gear.

“Holy shit,” I thought, as we carried all of it out to the car, “I guess I’m going to have to really be serious about this now.”

For the next month, I was busy with work, and travelling quite a bit, and didn’t get a chance to do more than crack the instruction manual a couple times. Eventually, though, I was able to get it all set up in the basement, and I’ve been spending as much time as I can down there, learning the equipment and doing test recordings, like this one, temporarily named ‘foundations’:

[audio:http://www.secretidentitycrisis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/02_foundations2.mp3|titles=Foundations (sample)]

This weekend I’m devoting both days to getting guitar and percussion tracks recorded for 9 songs that have so far made the cut for my upcoming album.

Time to get started.