Wednesday, April 30, 2014

When It Rains It Pours

I guess I've got the bug again, because there I was recording last night for the second day in a row.

I've been thinking about doing a Breeders tribute album for a long time now. I can't even remember how long...since 2011? 2012? Not sure. What stopped me was shitty recording equipment, fear of the vocals, and a lack of understanding of and skill for the guitar parts, especially the rhythm guitar parts.

Buoyed by too many listenings to Last Splash last weekend and watching other people's musical dreams come true for 3 straight days, in the last couple of days I've laid down drum tracks for the following:
Cannonball
Divine Hammer (plus bass, vox, lead guitar)
Do You Love Me Now
Flipside
Full on Idle
Hag
Huffer
I Just Wanna Get Along (plus vox)
Invisible Man
New Year
No Aloha
Roi
Saints
Son of Three (plus bass and vox)

Also did guitar/vox/bass for Off You.

It is sort of insane.

It feels like this could actually happen, and pretty quickly. The rhythm guitar parts will, of course, be the made limiting factor. But I think I'm gonna push through everything else and see how far I get. Thought about shooting to get it all done in a couple of weeks and calling it "15 in 15, It's Better Than Jail"...but we'll see.

Think I'm gonna try to store all projects on an external drive to avoid the lack of space problem. Was able to make room for several projects last night, but external storage is probably a necessity in general.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Recording Again

FW has an interest in recording and I have no interest in paying for such things, and so I've started futzing with my equipment again to see what is possible.

Last night I recorded several drum tracks for Breeders songs. I did a dynamic mic inside the bass drum and two dynamic mics overhead. Ran those three through a mixer and then stereo out to my usb interface and into Audacity. Turned out real nice.

My laptop then promptly freaked out. The old gal is in her final days and is totally full. It is an XP (no longer supported) machine with a relatively small hard drive by today's standards. I probably need to strip all but the essentials off the thing and then store any large files on an external drive. The Audacity project files are pretty huge.

If I ever have a few thousand extra dollars I'd like to get a dedicated recording laptop and a multi-track usb interface with 8 or so inputs. But this is unlikely to ever happen. Really for what I need, what I have is fine. I just need to clean up the laptop.

As for recording FW, the challenges are less about my equipment than about my expertise in using it ...and about the level of experience with recording in general of the performers. And I'm not sure I'm up to negotiating the ups and downs of the process. But in the meantime I've got a nice start on the Breeders tribute recording that I've been meaning to do for a few years now.