Distractions? More like DistROCKtions

Ok, I’ll go ahead and just apologize for that.

Updates have been slow in coming around here, and that’s because there haven’t been any to speak of.  My musical attention has been turned to another more high-profile project that has a more severe deadline.  We’re recording an album of Metroid Metal songs done by the full live band.  Basically, it’s an album of covers of covers.  I’ve been recording the drums and the bass, and I just recently finished all that.  The other guys are tossing their parts to Grant, and the whole thing is coming together pretty quickly.  The rough mixes I’ve heard so far sound great.

Now that I’m finished with my work for that (barring any touch-ups or red0s), I’m back to working on my album.  I’m in the home stretch now, and I’m going to have to amend my laissez-faire approach to my collaborators.  “What you can, when you can” isn’t as good of an option anymore.

Metroid Metal is going to be playing PAX over Labor Day weekend, and I’d really like to have the album done by then so I can have it available there.  I haven’t really mentioned that to anyone, so it wasn’t as high priority as the MM album which we advertised WILL be available at PAX (and at this rate, it’ll be done well before then).

We’re also talking about putting together a “sampler” album with a few tracks from each of our other projects.  Grant may have a song or two from his new instrumental EP ready, Dan (the other one) may have some tracks from the new Armcannon album, Kirby may have some TSS tracks on there, and I’ve got a couple from this project I can put on there.  Of course, Kevin is on all but one of the tracks of my album, so he’ll be well represented on the sampler too.  This is all in the “hey what if” stage at this point, so it may not happen, so don’t hold me to that.

The Wall, and how I have hit it.

Regular readers (if there are any left) may have noticed there hasn’t been an update in an while.  There hasn’t been much activity, so not much worth writing.  As I mentioned previously, drum tracks are done.  Bass tracks are done, with the exception of one song I need to re-record.  Rhythm guitar tracks are almost all done, but Grant’s guitar was in the shop for a while.  And there are a few songs waiting on various parts from other people.  I’ve been doing some mixing, and I feel like I have four songs that are ready to be mastered.  So, that’s 1/3 of the album there.  But really, everything is kind of at a standstill at the moment.

I’ve been listening to my current mixes a lot at home, in the car, at work, on headphones, etc.  and something happened that I did not expect – my kids really like the album so far.  As a matter of fact, they fight over their favorite songs.  My son really likes Release and Corporate Rock.  My daughter really likes Neatomatter.  The both love Naked Fight.  So, if nothing else, I’ve got the approval of my built-in fanbase.

The grind

I suppose the worst part about playing music is all the time you spend on music where you’re not actually playing music at all.  It takes a few minutes to record a couple of tracks, but it seems like for every minute you spend playing, you spend 2 on getting set up, 3 on fooling with the recorder, and 100 on mixing.  That’s how it’s seemed for me anyway.  Maybe if I really knew what I was doing, it would be different, but I’m doing a lot of experimenting along the way.

One of those things that gets kicked around as common knowledge that you should listen to your mixes on many different output devices, and don’t just trust the shiny, sparkly, pumping sound coming out of your fancy studio monitors.  I hadn’t done that until just the other day.  I listen to these songs either on my computer at home as I’m mixing, or at work on a really crappy pair of free computer speakers I found in a box.  I decided I was really pleased with the latest round of mixing, so I made a CD of everything I have so far and put it in the car.  The low end was overwhelming.

Since I’m primarily a bass player, you’ve got to realize I like the low end, so the mixes were pretty heavy on my very flat response monitors.  I don’t have a subwoofer on my mixing setup, so I’d overdone it.  The most embarassing thing was it was all in the bass guitar.  OOPS.  So, I went back and made another pass where it sounds good on my monitors, but the lowest low end of the bass is pulled down (everything below about 150hz is pulled down about 10db).  That instantly cleared up the mix, and the vocals jumped out at me.  I had to turn them down.  I may have cut too deeply, but it sounds pretty good in the car now, and I haven’t noticed any huge difference in these Dell specials on my work desk -except that I can actually hear bass articulation now, which is pretty key.

I’m doing something a little weird with the bass.  Well, it seems weird to me.  It may be another of those things that people just know to do.  It’s a trick I learned from Grant.  When we were working on the Actraiser track, I thought that my bass sounded great in the heavy parts of the song, but in a couple of places where it was just bass, I noticed it sounded distorted.  Grant had doubled my bass track and put a distortion effect on the 2nd track and mixed them together.  It was very subtle, and you could only really tell when the bass was by itself, but it really helped it cut through the mix.  I’m doing something similar on these songs, where appropriate.  I’m using the Voxengo Boogex plugin (http://www.voxengo.com), and it works great.  I even used it on a background guitar track I wanted to have distorted after the fact.  The best part is, it’s free.

I originally thought that I wouldn’t be posting any songs beyond the way-deep work in progress phase (ie, bass and drum mixes, rough mixes, etc), but people can change their minds.  Here’s an all-but-done mix of one of the songs.  It hasn’t been mastered yet, and I’m going to revisit that reverb on the vocals, but the final version shouldn’t be very different from this at all.

Naked Fight (formerly Concrete Flea)

music: Dan Taylor
lyrics: James Moats

The personnel here:

Kevin: drums
Grant: guitar
James: vocals
Dan: bass

So yeah, the core of this project.

The vocal performance is something else.  There are more vocal tracks than instrumental tracks.  That seems to be true for most of the songs.  And yes, this is the song about being ambushed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses I’d mentioned earlier.

Milestone reached!

Drum tracking is finished!  After a couple of redos, Kevin has finished recording all the drums.  I’ve recorded bass for all the tracks.  Well, at the very least, they’re scratch tracks.  I reserve the right to re-record bass as I see fit.

Right now, it looks like a running time of 45:39, but that’s not allowing for fade-outs or interstitial oddities.  My goal was to have an album that clocks in at around 45 minutes, so I’m pretty pleased.   The shortest song is 2:51 and, surprisingly, the longest song is only 4:48.  I’m no stranger to epic prog rock long songs, but I’ve tried to keep a focus on tighter songwriting for this, to not let it get away from me.  I’ve written 9+ minute songs without blinking, and I didn’t want that this time around.  I guess this is my version of a pop album.  It could possibly pass as a punk album.  It’s certainly not a pop-punk album.

I still have only one fully tracked song, but James has a rough draft for a song that sounds great so far.  When he’s done, that’ll be two songs done.  There’s one other that could probably be considered done, but I feel like I want to add another part to it.  Everything I’ve attempted hasn’t worked out, so I may just choose to leave it as is.

I can’t wait for this album to be done so I can listen to it.

Back in business

My new monitors arrived (along with all the free stuff in the package deal I got), so I’m stereophonic once again.  And it’s a good thing too because I just got some more tracks in, and I’ve been excited to hear them in the proper context.  I got a new batch from Grant, which are great, and I got some from my friend, Julian Martlew.  Julian is probably the person I would most describe as my mentor.  He was certainly the first person I ever played with, and he took me under his wing and set me on the path.

It was the first day of my sophomore year in college.  I’d started playing bass just a scant few weeks before, during the summer break.  I was moving into a new dorm, and as I stepped into the hall, bags in hand, there was Julian, sitting in his room (first on the left by the front door) rocking out.  I don’t remember what he was playing, but it was loud.  He kept it up the whole time, and the last thing I carried in past his door was my bass.  He stopped playing and followed me into my room, guitar and little Gorilla amp in hand and said, “Hi, I’m Julian, let’s play!”  Of course, I was scared out of my mind, because I’d never played outside my bedroom before.  Long story short, a couple of months later, he’s putting a band together, and they ask if another guy in the dorm can borrow my equipment since I was the only one around with a bass and amp.  I said no, so they asked me to play.  YAY DEFAULT!  I had to get up to speed in a hurry, and in less than 3 months after I first started playing bass, I was in my first band, and I never looked back.  If that hadn’t been such a great experience, I probably wouldn’t have kept it up all these years, so I have Julian to thank for a lot of that.

When we met, he was all about a weird blend of Bob Marley and the Scorpions with a liberal dash of the Blues.  Now, he plays Americana unironically.  At least it seemed unironic when I saw him on a sideman gig recently.  He’s lending his lap steel prowess to my little effort here, and so far it sounds great.

Back on track

Upon further review, it seems that the monitor that blew is actually not the one I just had repaired – it was the replacement I’d gotten for the first one that died.  So, that makes 3 dead monitors in the span of two years.  Not a good track record.  I’ve got a new set on the way (from a different manufacturer), thanks in no small part to finally receiving my state income tax return.

Drum tracking is almost finished.  There’s only one more song to record, and two more to re-record.  That includes the addition of another song to the mix – Corporate Rock – which we recorded last night.   Like most of the others, I wrote the music and James wrote lyrics, but I actually brought this song to Blue Dot, my old band, and we played it a few times live and recorded a version for our album that has yet to see the light of day.  As such, I wasn’t planning on including it, but James talked me into it.  I wasn’t totally pleased with the Blue Dot recording, so I’m glad to have another shot at this, and I think the complaints I had have been addressed.  If not, it’s my own fault.

We also finally recorded Sunday Best.  It was one I thought might wind up being the hardest, and in some ways it has been, but I think all the work that Kevin and I have done on it has paid off.  I’m pretty excited about this one.  I’ve been listening to the bass and drums mix all morning.

Technical difficulties

I’m so pissed right now.  My studio monitor that I just had repaired died again.  So, either I have to get another pair, or my album is going to be mono.

Hopefully, it’s just a fuse that’s blown, and nothing to go crazy about.  What are the chances of that?  Right, slim to none.

I think I’m just going to have to suck it up and get a new pair.  I’ll DEFININTELY be staying away from E-MU products.  Now, where did I put my Musician’s Friend credit card?

Doghouse

Sadly, the title isn’t a reference to my upright bass.  As I noted previously, I’ve got one song done now, and a couple more in the queue, so I’ve been mixing in earnest.  This is proving to be the most time-consuming part of the process.  Again, anyone who knows what they’re doing is probably saying, “well, duh” right about now.

I usually have about an hour to myself each morning that I’ve been using for working on music, but a number of factors have contributed to the erosion of this time, so I’ve been making that up in the evenings.  This is typically a bad thing because in the mornings, I have to leave to go to work at a specific time, so I’m forced to stop at some point.  When I do this at night, I’m limited only by my ability to keep my eyes open.  Also, I can’t mix at low volume, or at least the volume appropriate for a house full of sleeping people.

So yeah, doghouse.  I finally put together a mix I like last night after a couple of hours of tweaking, and I got up to find my wife in the living room.  She’d taken a long nap earlier in the evening when I took the kids to the store with me, so I asked, “did that nap keep you from being able to sleep now?”  She said, “well, that and stupid organ music.”

Oops.

One down…

I finally broke down and got a keyboard to add a couple of parts to some songs because my brief foray into midi was a nightmare, and now I have one completely tracked song.

I’ve been playing around with mixing and mastering this song, just to see what I can do, and so far I’m pretty frustrated with the results.  The problem is, it sounds pretty good without anything done to it, but I feel like it could be better, but anything I do to it doesn’t really improve it.  I guess that’s a good problem to have, but it really just seems like a matter of I don’t know what I’m doing.  But, I guess that’s the point.  It’s a learning process.

Vegetables first, THEN dessert

Most of the songs for this album were written before I started, but I’ve gotten to a point where I’m having to finish a couple of songs that were basically works in progress when I decided to include them.  The cool part is, I’m able to write them with specific people in mind, so I’m not limited by what I’m capable of doing.  I really like the writing process, and working so much on the other songs has kind of put me in that frame of mind anyway since I’ve been open to changing things along the way.

Of course, what this means is, all the easy stuff is done, and I’m getting into the harder songs, and the songs that require more work.  That’s ok, because I planned it so I would be easing myself into it.  I’m not the only one working though, James has had to come up with some new lyrics for a song that didn’t have any previously.  Luckily, I ran into a spot of weirdness today, and that served as fodder for a song idea.  I’ll save you the long version and simply say I nearly got into a fight with a Jehovah’s Witness today, naked.  By that, I mean I was naked.  The Jehovah’s Witness was well dressed, as you might expect.

In other news, I’ve pulled a few more musicians into the fold and doled out some parts for them.  I’m eagerly awaiting their submissions, because I know they’ll be great.  The aforementioned song I’m rewriting and extending is because of one of them in particular, my friend Pledger Fretwell.  Yes, that’s his real name, so it only follows that he can play guitar like a fiend.  Right now, I’ve got him playing on two of the songs (so far), and they are probably the two most dissimilar songs on the album.  That’s fine though, because he’s up to it – his style is very unconventional so it’s fun to put him in different situations.  He and I played together in my very first band back in ’91.  Before he took up the guitar, he was a bassist – a classically trained double-bassist.  Any time he had anything to say on the subject of bass, I listened.  He’s also a walking encyclopedia of musical knowledge.  He’s a total jazz head, and he’s slumming by playing on my rock album, but it’s not the first time.  Hopefully, he’ll bring all that with him.

I know just enough theory to be able to communicate ideas to other musicians.  He forgets this sometimes and talks completely over my head, but that’s ok.  I still listen now like I did back then.  Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot from playing with him over the years, and I’m very glad to have him as a friend.  I certainly wouldn’t want him as an enemy.  In addition to being a top knotch musician, he’s also kind of a badass and could beat the crap out of me without breaking a sweat.