The Man Who Couldn't Decide What Flavor He Wanted
Yesterday, I left the library, after I had sat for three hours, reading the Audacity Manual and experimenting with mixing stuff that I already had recorded onto my hard drive.
Then, I got the brainstorm of thinking: "I wonder if there are drum beats out there (made with real drums; not 5 gallon buckets hit with sticks) available for downloading for free, even.
Sure enough, I grabbed some beats and that is what you hear in the "flavor" song, which I wrote in 1985, about a guy holding up the ice cream line at Kimballs Ice Cream, where they make their own ice cream (and you can hear cows mooing in back; to prove it). Google say's it's in Weston, Mass. But they have more than one location, and I think we went to the one in Littleton, Mass.
It is a very popular place (we drove like 30 miles to get there) and the line at the window can get pretty long, especially if there is someone who can't decided what flavor he wants...
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| I Will Cross This Bridge... |
Busking At Dusk
Do The Hustle
Then, I decided to busk in front of the Chevron on Scenic Highway, which I did as the sun went down and I made about 3 dollars in an hour and a half. I might have done better if there wasn't a pan handler siting right by my side hollaring to everyone for money.
He was giving me beer, though.
He said that he sympathised with me, because he is "out here," too.
He handed me a styrofoam cup and replenished it a couple times out of a 40 Magnum Malt Liquor bottle.
I thought that was very nice of him, since I wasn't making that much money and certainly wasn't going to spend "all" three bucks on beer, maybe just half of it.
Then, as I was getting ready to leave to go make the recording above, he wanted me to buy him a beer, out of the money that I made.
I then realized that his giving me beer was like a ploy, so that he could spend the money that he panhandled on beer, and then spend the money that was in my case on more beer, by making me think that I owed him something. He probably thought that I was going to make more than 3 bucks and was planning to get back more than he gave me, like a true hustler.
Studio By The Roadside
Anyways, I went and made the recording, learning more by making more mistakes.I grade this one a D+.
I forgot to include one of the best lines: "He asked for a minute in which to decide; she said 'no problem.' She lied."
Techno Talk
And I had to scrap the entire lead guitar part in the morning, after discovering that I messed up the echo effect on it.*
*You should record one track of just the raw guitar with no echo; and then an adjacent one with just the echo, no guitar; that way, you can mix the two in any proportion, making it really echo-y or just a little bit echo-y. I think I saved only the track with the echo on it. It sounds funny hearing echoes without having heard the original sound; funny, but not musical.I might have given it a C- had the lead guitar come out alright.
Geek Speak
One cool discovery that I made was to use the "change pitch without altering tempo" effect to drop the sound of my guitar down one octave, effectively making it the "bass guitar" that you hear on the recording. Again, I would have been playing it a little differently had I known what it was going to sound like upon playback, but it was getting to be almost sunrise, at that point in time. It sounds more like an upright acoustic bass than an electric one; probably because my guitar is an acoustic, rather than an electric.
I hope to soon be making decent recordings that I can unleash upon Facebook. These aren't ready for prime time; and I include them here only so that my readers can suffer along with me with the growing pains of learning to use the studio!
The ice cream song is pretty funny and cool, but i dont know about using other peoples beats in your song. Even if its free to download an use, and you sing over it, can you really call it yours?
ReplyDeleteListening to the mobile2.mp3, getting fancy is neat but don't forget to play to your strengths, which i'd say is your guitar playing (sans harp and effects). This seemed kinda all over the place and the bucket was distracting (i know you needed it for timing...maybe remove it after?).
Yes, having learned how to play and sing at the same time is like riding a unicycle and juggling; either your doing it perfectly or you're falling off and dropping the bowling pins; having to do stuff one track at a time takes me out of "the void" which is like self hypnosis and becomes automatic music (like automatic writing where you put pen to paper and let your subconscious mind go, not paying attention or caring what is going on the paper; then (supposedly, according to psycho therapists) when you look at the paper, there will be written something like "get the fuk out of Scottlandville" and you will have no recollection of having written it; and supposedly there can be an important message that your subconscious is trying to get through to you lol!
ReplyDeleteThat being said, when I do one track at a time, my mind drifts; or I easily get bored with the part and try to fancy it up, which becomes a curse later when another track wants to be fancy and doesn't have a solid repetitive (boring by itself) backdrop.
I am constantly mulling over solutions, as I walk around. my latest idea is to take a 16 bar drum pattern and play a basic rhythm guitar over it; then copy and paste it until it's 128 bars, or whatever; then the guitar will behave itself and stay constant and in the background without getting fancy; there is joy in repetition, as Prince once sang...
Recording is a skill in and of itself; I can think of a lot of artists who go into the studio and turn my favorite song into an antiseptic, lifeless plastic replica of it...