Tag Archives: problems

It can't all be good

I knew everything was going too smoothly.

I’ve started getting tracks from my other conspirators, and I’m running into some odd technical issues.  Mainly, tracks aren’t lining up when I put them all together in the same session.  To make matters more confounding, one of the reference tracks I recorded became out of sync when I rendered it down to a stereo track.  Grant tried to play along with it, and the bass was a full beat ahead of the drums!  I checked my original session, and it was fine, so I have no idea what happened.  I re-rendered the reference track and sent that to Grant, so hopefully that hurdle is overcome.

I also got my first vocal tracks today from my friend, James, and I’m over the moon ecstatic about this.  He noticed a problem with the sync in his reference too – on a different song that Grant had issues with.  He noticed about a 1/10th of a second discrepancy, and I noted this too when I tried to add Grant’s guitar for that song into my session.  I was able to cut a bit of silence from the beginning of Grant’s tracks to make them line up, and everything was fine, so I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but since James has mentioned it as an issue he’s had, I’m more than a little concerned about this.

Right now, though, I’m not letting this get in the way of being happy about what’s essentially my first completed song for the album.  This kind of came out of nowhere, because I didn’t expect to get any vocals until I was able to return most of the stuff I’d borrowed from James.

We’ve played together for years now, and written a bunch of music together.  I don’t know if there’s anyone I trust more with my music than James.  There have been so many times that I’ve written something and he’s taken my caterpillar of an idea and handed me back a butterfly.  A lot of these songs came about this way – I’d write some music, and he’d come back with some amazing lyrics and vocals.  He also played drums and guitar on a lot of the demos for these songs, so there was no way I couldn’t include him in this.  Actually, he’s pretty much the one responsible for planting the seed that grew into this.  He’s the one who came up with “Yes, Mayhem” which I love, and he was the one who suggested I try a solo album.  When I say “solo” I mean that facetiously because this is a collaborative effort, and there’s no one more involved in this than he is and has been.

Funny story about how spoiled I am by the consistent quailty of James’ contributions to this thing I do:  Once, I tried out for a band and put together some songs as a resume for the guy in charge.  There were maybe 6 or 8 songs on there showcasing my versatility as a bassist, because I wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for.  He called me freaking out and said that he wanted to scrap the album he was working on and have me write a whole new one from scratch with him!  He also wanted to use a few of the songs on my demo tape.  That was more than I bargained for, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.  He said he’d overdub some stuff (lead guitar and vocals) over one of the songs and get it back to me to see what I thought.

I hated it.

The guy is a great player and a really nice guy, and what he’d done was certainly competent, but it just wasn’t a good fit at all, stylistically.  In fact, it was pretty much the exact opposite of my aesthetic.  I felt like someone had shot my dog.  James was living in Indiana at the time, but I called him in a panic and played the song for him over the phone.  He agreed with me.  I ended up cutting ties with the guy, hopefully amicably, because I knew it wasn’t a good musical fit.  James ended up recording his own version of the song in question, and I loved it, and love it now.

What I’ve gotten out of James so far hasn’t let me down, and I can’t wait to hear what’s next.  I just need to figure out these technical issues.