It’s a rare Saturday post! The shop opens next week and the record release is a week from today. Preorders are ongoing! Busy, busy!
I started this series over here. Some of you have been asking me to continue writing about this, so here we go! The last post left off at a moment of decision. Does this song stall out, or do I record it?
Well, let’s assume this one makes it, and we can use a recently completed song as an example: Racoon Tour. This one came about in the way I’ve described previously, I thought of some lines I liked and they presented with a melody attached. I started aggregating other lines that were matchy-match. Then I found some chords.
I did a quick voice memo recording. There were a couple of lines, the current last lines of the song that I was unsure of, so I left them off. A night or two later, I decided to play the song at the open mic that I frequent. Playing the song a few times to be ready to perform it, those last lines seemed like they belonged so they got included. They are:
Off-kilter builder I get devastated all the time I'll be right here
The last line is kind of like the chorus because it’s repeated three times over the course of the 90-second song.
I really liked writing, performing, and recording the song in the span of a week. I prefer to move fast, for a few reasons:
Outrunning the inner-critic: If I let myself think about any of this too much, I will find reasons to reject the song. In fact, one of the best strategies for me to get started is to invite myself to make up the dumbest lyrics and most obvious music imaginable, so I can get something down, and if I stop to reflect on any of it, the dumb- and obvious-ness overwhelms me and it goes to the song-graveyard.
Lo-fi aesthetic: I’m of the belief that things rarely get better as you labor over them. This position is aligned to my comments earlier in this series about not getting too caught up in recording equipment. Whatever it is that grabs me about a song (my own or someone else’s), whatever that thing is, it’s there right away (or it isn’t). That thing is usually most potent in its earliest manifestation—the demo or what have you. The danger is that whatever it was that was interesting can get ironed out or watered down if you keep working on the song/recording. This happens to a lot of people who are pretty good at recording; they unintentionally drain out whatever made their songs interesting as they perfect the recording. It doesn’t have to go that way, of course, but a pretty effective way of avoiding it is to keep moving.
Quantity: I like it when an artist does a lot of whatever it is they do. I’m not sure why this appeals to me. But when a band puts out an album every 2-5 years, it seems really strange to me. If you’re doing this for a living, shouldn’t you be churning out songs all the time? What else are you doing? I’m not doing this for a living, but even so, I want to produce as much as I can.
After recording the voice memo and playing the song in front of real live people, I wanted to do a “proper” recording—as proper as my approach, skill, and equipment makes possible. Recording usually starts with another voice/guitar take.
That guitar/vocal take becomes the kernel I build the rest of the recording around. Sometimes it gets buried by other tracks or even gets removed as the other tracks take over, but the basic timing and phrasing persist. So, if I’m off time, which happens a lot!, I have to be able to recreate the off-timing each take and in the other instrumental performances. Sometimes if something is too unpredictable, I will retake the basic vocal/guitar track to correct whatever was off and make it more repeatable.
Usually, though, I don’t do more than a take or two of anything, and I rarely practice the song or any of the parts before recording, so often what you’re hearing is my first or second time playing any given part. I like this approach and sometimes idiosyncrasies of a take end up becoming the song because whatever variations in vocal phrasing or whatever get codified in the recording. So in that way, the recording process is part of the writing process.
With a reasonably in-time guitar/vocal take, I’ll start layering on other instruments. With Racoon Tour I added another acoustic guitar track, the darker green one above. At this point I was thinking I would end up also retaking the vocal and totally replacing the original guitar/vocal take, so having a clean acoustic guitar track is going come in handy.
Having totally clean acoustic guitar is great, but I like things messy, so I added some fuzz bass. There’s lots more to say about my love of fuzz, which I’ll take a long aside to go into in the next post. For now, here’s a pic of my pedal board that I use for bass and guitar.
For a while now, I’ve been splitting my signal and running through a guitar amp and a bass amp simultaneously. There are a lot of advantages to being able to control the signal chains separately, but for the bass part on Racoon Tour, I ran through the bass amp only, and—I can barely believe this one!—turned down the fuzz a little bit.
Wow! What a revelation! Can you even imagine the shocking admissions that lie ahead!?! Stay tuned!