Category: Studio Diary (Page 21 of 23)

In the process of mixing and remixing “Listen” I think I have figured out what is wrong. The crunchy guitar isn’t letting the other instruments breath, and what’s more, it obnoxiously interrupts the vocals. It’s gotta change, duh. As a result, I’ve been re-doing the guitar part and I think it is somewhat cooler than it was. Downside: I’m still not done with this behemoth.

Editor’s Note, August 2020: Curious about where this track ended up? It was finally completed in 2019 and is included on The Inevitable Obscenity of Autonomous Weaponry, our second album:

http://www.prodigalsounds.com/inevitable/listen.html

https://theprodigalsounds.bandcamp.com/track/listen

I haven’t felt like dumping my thoughts into the public arena for a month or so. Working two jobs is using up most of my creative energy, and what’s left is going into trying to complete the Piece Of Music That Just Won’t Die, titled “Listen” but might be more accurately be called “Please Finish”.

I just want to make it perfect. Is that so wrong?

This weekend we are going to see Rush at the MGM Grand Arena. Ho ho. The title of this entry seems extra appropriate.

The Blueshifter is… still coming. Those nice guys at Carvin are really looking out for me. But the upshot is that it will take a few more weeks. More as it comes to hand.

My hands hurt. But there is nothing like a little real percussion to liven up a track. A couple of months ago Guitar Center had a sale and I picked up a tamborine, a shaker, and a doumbek. Well, they’ve been sitting around looking pretty but not actually producing sound. However, this weekend I experimented with adding percussion to the track I’ve been working on for the last six months, and boy, does it make a difference. The MIDI-sequenced drum samples sound much better when mixed with a little analog zing, splash and poum.

The downside is that my hands hurt. I’ll give serious props to percussion players from now on. It’s tricky to keep a steady beat, and even more tricky to do it when you’ve got a blister on the inside of your thumb caused by casual tamborine use.

I suspect I am the only person in the world trying to use MIDIQuest with the Digitech GSP21. It turns out that the GSP apparently ignores requests for a sysex dump unless it is sitting on the utility menu option “Dump MIDI Data? Press V for Yes”. As soon as you get it to that point, you can tell MIDIQuest to extract the patch information from the device and display it in the edit buffer on the computer screen. What is also not obvious is that the only mode that appears to work is “ALL” information, but it *looks* like a single patch. If you right-click on the patch name, you get a drop-down list of all of the patches and you can jump to any particular one.

So, good news: GSP21 patches are backed up, and I got the POD backed up as well. And, I’ve discovered that the correct settings to get a decent guitar sound for that piece I’ve been working on: It’s the middle single-coil pickup on the Ibanez, through the “Paradigm Lead” patch on the GSP. And it sounds better still if I use the POD on the GSP’s effect loop for gain/distortion and use the GSP for tap delays only.

Sometimes, when the urge to create gets too strong, I will work on a piece of music in my spare time.

I want to say “work in my studio” but the truth is that my “studio” is really just one wall of my office, totally occupied by 19 inches of rack equipment, two synthesizer keyboards, a mixer, and my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) with two 15″ LCD monitors. In other words, when I’m in my office trying to work on some technical or business related thing that, theoretically, earns us some money, my “studio” is two feet away covered by an old sheet that reduces the rate of dust accumulation, but that does nothing to muffle the tiny electronic cries of neglect.

I have learned that their cries are impotent ones, because by themselves, the items of studio equipment do nothing to kick-start the flow of creative juices necessary for making progress on numerous musical projects.

About a week ago I pushed myself into re-working an older piece of mine that I was in danger of losing the “source code” for. I’ve had some success – the MIDI instruments have had their patches restored and the sounds safely rendered to hard disk in the form of 24-bit digital audio.

On the not-so-good side of things, I have been unable to remember how to play the bass line on my Chapman Stick, which, through lack of use, is kind of in a state of disrepair. Also, all the guitar sounds I’ve tried so far, sound horrible. It’s that old problem, the my-god-the-demo-sounds-almost-perfect-and-you’ll-never-get-it-sounding-that-good-again situation.

The other drawback is that I’ve played through the peice so many times that it is forming the continuous looping soundtrack to my brain. It’s particularly noticeable right now. Every time I pause in writing a sentance, thinking about what to write next, or try to put my brain in neutral to catch a mental breath, it’s there like demonic muzak.

Even in my imagination the guitar sounds like crap.

Editors note, August 2020: I have no idea what song I was referring to, here. I’m guessing, Painting Abstracts. I could be way off base.