slowburn

Meddle by Pink Floyd, 1971

Dallas came over and we finished up the rough mixes for “Upbeat” and “Puppy”, I have mixed feelings about them but am going to put them aside for now. I put the “Upbeat” mix up on our myspace page, the song was approved immediately but for some reason they are lagging on the cover picture.

Next up is “Lurp”, which was always kind of an oddball track in the original set. The current plan is to make it sort of a transitional song between the peak of “Rollover” and the last few tracks which are a lot more mellow. It’s a weird one with a darker vibe and lots of strange noises, so hopefully it will be fun to work on. I’m going to try to pattern it after “On the Run” from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” which was one of the first semi-experimental synthesizer based songs that I really got into growing up. I’ve got the basic Logic file set up with scratch tracks and ready to record into, so tomorrow I’ll work on the Nord Modular patches and come up with some effects chains.

Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, 1974

All the tracks for “Upbeat” have been recorded. I’m still not happy with a couple of them but will probably let them sit for a while and see if I’m happier when I come back to them. We’ve been writing, playing, and listening to this set for over a year and a half now so I have certain sounds ingrained in my head, and at the same time I want it to be different and better. So it’s kind of a no-win situation sometimes, if I keep it the same it’s boring, if I change it then it doesn’t sound right. Add on top of that the fact that if you listen to anything enough you’ll start hating it, and I’ve been listening to these parts a lot lately, and it becomes even harder to figure out whether it’s actually any good or not.

Still need to quickly re-do a couple parts of “Puppy” that I don’t like, then we’ll do rough mixes of the two songs and move on to the next two songs. I’m a little frustrated that things are taking so long, and when I get frustrated I no longer feel like working on it which just makes things worse. Given the hard drive crash and the getting sick thing, finishing up three songs in six weeks isn’t that bad. But, the original schedule had us finished by now and we’re nowhere close so that’s hard to accept. I’m thinking that here on out we will probably plan on just doing one song a week, unless things get significantly easier as time goes on. This will have us finishing up sometime in April, which matches up nicely with my marathon plans. Hopefully in a couple months I’ll be able to say I finished both.

We’ve been confirmed to play the Circuit Festival in Denver in June, which will be cool. The tentative plan is to play a new “Slowburn” based set, I’d like to add something extra and new to it but so far I’m not sure what that might be. Possibilities are a synced light show, a video backdrop, the use of some new controllers, maybe some other things. We’ll keep thinking about it in the background.

Tomorrow I’m going to work on finishing up the rough mixes for “Puppy” and “Upbeat”, and figure out which song to start on next.

E2-E4 by Manuel Göttsching, 1984

Silver Apples of the Moon by Morton Subotnick, 1967

Still recording “Upbeat”. I am finding that I again just don’t like the way a couple of the tracks are sounding. I’m not sure exactly why, but my current thoughts are it’s either:

1) Too much real time control, as I mentioned before. Solution: narrow the range of the morph control on the Nord Modular patches.
2) Going into some of the pedals with slightly too hot of a signal is causing some subtle distortion that is giving things a weird edge. Solution: experiment more with gain staging at different points in the effects chain.
3) I’m not being subtle enough with the effects, which sounds good on individual sounds but sounds crappy in the mix. Solution: try lower depth settings, record effects separately and mix with dry.
4) Some of the effects are just imparting some sort of sound I don’t like, regardless of 2) and 3). Solution: experiment with different pedals to see which if any are doing this.

It is definitely a new experience for me recording everything wet with effects and then having to mix those sounds as is, rather than having the ability to tweak effects during the mix stage as part of the mixing process. I’m hoping once I get more experience doing this I will just develop a better ear for knowing what sounds I need to be hearing during recording to get the sounds I will want to mix with. Currently I am very happy with the sounds as I record them, but once I put them all together I get frustrated…

A new distraction arrived in the form of a Wii videogame console. It’s pretty fun and will hopefully serve to relieve stress, rather than prevent music-related work from happening due to creating an excessive compulsion to throw plungers at rabbits. We’ll (wii’ll?) see…

Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno, 1978

71 by Cluster, 1971

Today I recorded several tracks for “Upbeat”, I think it’s sounding pretty good. I used the double Kaoss pad setup again, this time with the KP1 attached to the Roland SDE-330 delay instead of the Kurzweil KSP. It was easy to set up and worked fine. I also ended up using the Flanger Hoax on one of the tracks, basically on a whim because I wanted to play with it, and it ended up sounding great. I’ll try to record the rest of the tracks tonight so I can mix it, re-record a couple tracks and re-mix “Puppy”, and hopefully have two finished songs by the end of week six (!).

I think I had the right idea about what was bothering me with “Puppy”… it was a mistake to add too much real time control to every sound, it made all of them stick out and fight with each other for attention. For “Upbeat” I’ve been keeping some of the sounds more static, and toning down the effects so they’re present but more subtle, and I’m much happier with the results. I also need to remember when tweaking the individual Nord patches that not every sound needs to be sharp and attention grabbing, when I tweak the envelopes in particular I seem to go for a particular distinctive type of sound with all of them and I need more variety.

I decided to put up the mp3 of the “Puppy” mix that I’m not happy with. It’s here. Note that it has a scratch part for the song before it at the beginning, and one for the song after it at the end. Since the album is going to be a continuous mix of all the songs, I have the scratch parts there for now so that I have a rough idea of the types of sounds that the song will be mixed into. After listening to it for the past few days, there are definitely parts I like and I think by re-recording a few of the ones that stick out and changing up a few mixing options we should end up with something I’lll be happy with. I’m not sure it’s going to have the feel that I was planning for it, but you can’t have everything.

Tomorrow I’ll finish recording “Upbeat” and try to start a rough mix of it.