Tuesday, September 30, 2003

  I know I haven't been updating the studio blog lately, but I have been recording. I figured a bunch of posts along the lines of "I recorded two vocal tracks when I got home from work yesterday" would be kind of boring. But I've been making progress of the slow but steady kind, and in fact the end is in sight. I've been sneaking in an hour here and two hours there, which is much different than how I've recorded before. But it seems to be working. Sean seems to like it:



I finished up with the third hard drive worth of songs, except for a couple backup vocals which I'm going to get some help on. That disk had five songs on it, the three difficult ones with finger picking on them, one song I didn't have much hope for but which came out pretty good, and a total re-recording of a song which I'd done on the second disk. I wasn't happy with the arrangement so I did it over.
I've now loaded the songs from the first disk which I was having technical difficulties with on to an entirely new disk. I did lose some parts, but was able to salvage more than I thought I would. These are the songs with drums on them. I now have to do a couple rhythm guitar tracks, lead guitar tracks, and vocals on them. There was one non-drums song on that disk which was a little messed up, so I decided to try to re-do it from scratch. I created a drum loop using Steve's playing and it just may work. Yesterday I recorded the acoustical guitars for that one, so now it needs bass, electric guitar, and vocals.
So there's light at the end of the tunnel. I predict I'll be done tracking in a couple weeks.
I've been doing a lot of vocals at 8 in the morning on the weekends when Molli takes Sean for a walk, which is an interesting time to be recording, or right when I get home from work and they are at the park. In the end I have 16 new songs recorded. I will probably take out a few when I do an official release. It remains to be seen how the acoustic songs will sound next to the electric songs. And who knows, perhaps I'll come up with a couple more.
posted by Greg McIlvaine 11:26 AM

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

 

Here's a picture of me recording some soft vocals with my collaborator. Sean added some subtle snoring to the tracks.
posted by Greg McIlvaine 9:08 PM

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

 


posted by Greg McIlvaine 9:51 PM

Wednesday, September 03, 2003

  So, I got a lot done recording over the weekend, but not quite as much as I could have due to technological difficulties. The hard drive I was using for the electric songs started doing weird things, cutting out tiny bits of different tracks. I'd put in a larger disk than I'd used before, and it seemed to be running much hotter than normal. Once I noticed this, I spent valuable time backing stuff up, then recorded more, noticed more problems, and backed up again. At that point I switched disks and started in on the acoustic stuff.
The new (actually old) disk seemed to work fine, and I was able to record the bulk of 7 songs on it. A few are done, a few need a couple tracks added/redone, and I think one song needs to be re-done completely due to an unsatisfactory arrangement.
I will load the electric tracks on to a new (old) disk at some point and see if they are salvageable. If not, I still have the drum tracks backed up and could start again from there. It was sort of a bummer, but looking back I did get a lot done.
The good news is that the Taylor sounds awesome recorded. I used a combination of mostly condenser microphone about a foot out with just a touch of the internal pickup to add prescence. It sounds really good and clean, and very dynamic.
In total I worked on 12 out of 15 finished songs, but depending on when I can find time to work on them it is going to take awhile to get the whole thing finished. I did record all three waltzes though.
posted by Greg McIlvaine 2:43 PM