Tuesday, May 7, 2024: How I Write and Record Songs, part 1 and CotD
Process, anyone? and the Collage of the Day
CotD below, but first, an aside and indulgent metacommentary
I’m pushing into the world of social media these days—see below for links. It’s not my first foray. Believe it or not, my SM experience goes all the way back to Friendster and I was big into MySpace, but I had been mostly off SM for a few years, and I wasn’t really missing it. I mark the beginning of that hiatus back to when I dropped Facebook. I’ve returned; don’t worry. I was still on LinkedIn for work stuff, and I kept a Twitter profile to track a handful of creatives: Milo/RAP Ferreira, William Gibson, Erik Larsen, Paul F. Tompkins. No Instagram, nothing else.
As I’ve returned to social media, I’m making what I would call “a moderate effort to do it well,” which, in this case, involves some degree of attempting to give people what they want. I don’t know what people want, and frankly, I’m new to caring.
What the People Want
They say people want to see process. TBH, sharing process kinda makes my skin crawl. It feels very self-aggrandizing. But it also feels like the kind of fire that I will benefit from running into—that whole getting-out-of-your-comfort-zone thing. So here goes!
This is a studio shot. This looks pretty different from a traditional recording studio:
The round black cylindrical thing on the edge of the desk in the pic above is the hardware component of iZotope’s Spire app. After I broke down sold off my more-elaborate-yet-still-very-homegrown studio in preparation for moving from Chicago to Asheville, I started using this. There’s something to be written about why I liquidated the old studio, but in any case, that’s what I did. When I was ready to start recording again, I wanted something simple.
Gear, particularly recording gear, is the rabbit hole of rabbit holes. Lots of people get lost chasing the right microphone preamp or outboard reverb unit. IMO the point of diminishing returns is very early if we’re plotting the interest-provocation of the final product on the vertical axis, and the complexity and/or quality of the gear used to record it on the horizontal axis.
In fact, the graph above doesn’t depict an actual dip for me after the point of diminishing returns—where someone has nice stuff and they know how to use it, but they end up making very sterile stuff—a big problem in the hi-fi home recording space IMO.
More on the purple guy in the pic beyond the paywall, and more installments in the writing/recording process series to come. For now, CotD!
CoTD
Today’s collage is called: Knock Down Drag, or The Napoleonic Otter-Boxing Blues
Below for more on the Maxx and the NSFW paid feed collage: Ride the Darker Wave
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