Category: Demos

A couple musical updates.

11/8/2014

I'm on the tail-end of getting my demos done. I only have a couple more things to put together before I can take it to my cousin for mastering. Here are the couple of the remaining tasks:

I need to get my friend Brianna to sing a little on "The Long Run."
I need to get my friend Jon to shout on "The People" and "Friday Night."
I need to get my friend Gord to play some piano on "I Still See You." This may lead to me re-recording the bass track, but that's still up in the air.

That's about it. Then I can do my best to mix it before I take it to Kelly for mastering.

However, it doesn't look like I'm going to get to turn it into a CD any time soon. The strike took a good chunk out of my regular income and recent car trouble took a further chunk out of any selfish endeavors for a few months.

In the meantime, I've been uploading all of Once and Over Again to BandCamp.

I also sang a few songs at the open mic night at Tractorgrease Cafe a few weeks ago. The originals were well-received, so that's encouraging.

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Warren Berger's "Questions are the New Answers."

8/13/2014

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Here's something cool from BigThink: Warren Berger discussing questions:

Here's my favorite part:

I mean we've got so much that we have to adapt to. We have to solve problems. We have to deal with change, uncertainty and questioning is the tool or one of the primary tools that lets you do that. A great definition I saw for questioning is that questioning enables us to organize our thinking around what we don't know. So in a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we really need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information and find our way to the next answer.

Nothing fancy, but it's nice to hear a few or my biases get some confirmation.

By the way, I got a little more recording done. I recorded my uncle Monte's guitarwork and my cousin-in-law's voice for "Living the Dream," as well as a touch of vocals from my brother's wife Rachelann on "Soothe Me." I'm very, very close to having it all done. I can almost taste it.

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Distorted guitar solos.

7/21/2014

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I just noticed that all of the guitar solos on the upcoming album are pretty distortion-heavy. I don't think a single solo appears on the new disc that doesn't feature a significant level of distortion.

Most notable in this regard is "Shiver With Pride," which features this following eight-note solo. I'd recorded it in 2012 as a rough take, as a mere example of what I was going for. However, its simplicity stuck. When I re-recorded the solo in the summer of 2013, in stereo with a slide, I basically copied the original solo note-for-note. However, the new version just didn't play as dirty as I'd grown familiar with in my rough, rough mix, so I pasted this version in to dirty up the mix a little.

shiver_solo_2012.mp3
File Size:	289 kb
File Type:	mp3

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Later in the song, when the big lead guitar returns over the final repetition of the chorus, I didn't need to splice this in; in that section, the slide was dirty enough. But for the solo proper, the bits of lo-fi distortion seemed necessary.

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My recordings' uncanny valley.

5/24/2014

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I feel discouraged. I've put a lot of work and time into these songs. I hope to release them in August. I only have a few more people to record. They feel so close.

They don't sound professional, but I can't say they sound particularly amateur either. They kind-of fit in the middle, in the uncanny valley of modern recorded music. They aren't good enough for college radio, but they're not primitive enough to sound like mere demos.

I don't know what to do to fix them. I don't have the technical expertise to know what to do or how to make them sound more real. They sound like professional recordings in the same way that Christian Contemporary Music sounds like mainstream rock and roll, sort of. They feel like an attempt at emulation that misses the mark.

Above I've posted a mix of "This is the Time." I hope to get my wife to join Nicola's voice, but I bet the song's pretty-much done.

It sounds rough. I don't really know what to do to fix it. The bass doesn't cut through; the guitars sound kind-of dead; the vocals seem distant. It could rock, but it's missing some essential ingredients. And I'm not talking about the drum machine; the drum machine can rock pretty hard. I'm talking about everything else.

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I think I'm with recording myself for a while.

4/21/2014

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Last night I think I finished playing and singing the last parts for the demos. My personal performances are done. Now it's just a matter of getting all the other parts recorded by other people. Now's when I need to be driving all over the Lower Mainland and Island to gather voices and a couple instruments. Woo hoo!

It's a shame that the end is still so far away, but this is a good plateau. This means that I can mix things as well as I possibly can and focus on getting other participants on the project.

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A couple musical updates.

Warren Berger's "Questions are the New Answers."

Distorted guitar solos.

My recordings' uncanny valley.

I think I'm with recording myself for a while.

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