OMG THE NEW HOTNESS, IT CAME OUT OF NOWHERE:

Seriously, it’s like some kind of Golden Age.

Recording vocal tracks is stressful. For a start, you want to be in “good voice” but at my age that doesn’t happen automatically. Then comes the worse part: reviewing numerous vocal takes, selecting the best ones. I don’t know anyone who likes listening to their own voice. I prefer not sounding like a robot, so pitch and timing tweaks need to be applied carefully and surgically, which is tedious.

On the plus side, the next stage of the process can be glorious, when the best lead and backing vocal takes are assembled, panned, mixed and additional fairy dust reverb applied… and it sounds amazing. (relatively)


It’s all very well going around saying, “the album is 75% completed” but that remaining 25% doesn’t write itself. I’m currently in that composition space trying to modulate from D to E in a creative way that uses motifs from the existing sections of music, and suffering from something akin to the TETRIS Effect in that all I can hear in my head is that really bad attempt that I practiced but now hate hate hate. I have the correct solution, I think, but all I can hear is that bad one. Distracting. Maddening. Maybe it’s actually the “advertising jingle effect”?