Blog: Studio Sweat

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You find me Slightly Confused this morning, as I've just spoken to my first couple of HUMANS for a day or so... for LO! on Saturday lunchtime The Factor In My Sun Lotion and The Landlady both headed off to CROATIA for a VERY well deserved holiday, leaving me at home to look after the CATS. Long term visitors may recall that on the other two occasions they've done this I've been a) in a constant state of panic about one or more of said cats keeling over/being kidnapped b) invaded by FOXES c) bored and PINING. The first two of these problems are easily dealt with as our cats are Old Ladies now and are quite happy, for the most part, to loll around the house watching telly or comparing scars, so there's less worry about them being out and about, and we don't seem to have any foxes in the back garden yet this year. I can only assume that a full blown HUNT must have rampaged across our gardens because, as we all know, there is absolutely no other way to deal with such things...

The THIRD problem, however, needed dealing with, so i have SET TO recording this mini-album that's hopefully coming out on Popgun Recordings later this year. I got a couple of new WIRES to plug into the back of the computer, so I don't have to keep leaning round the back to plug things in, and have impinged upon the usual TIDINESS of THE STUDY (oh yes!) with LEADS, PEDALS, a microphone, keyboards, and my three AXES i.e. guitar, bass and ukelele. I'd got SOFTWARE installed, I'd just ABOUT got the hang of using it (still haven't figured out ENVELOPES yet mind you), and so on Saturday afternoon i sat down to begin WORK.

I tell you what, it's a lot more complicated being DIGITAL. When my cassette four track was working it was quite an easy job to knock off a couple of songs a day. The hard part was playing each part correctly all the way through, ESPECIALLY when you were writing the tracks as you went along (ESPECIALLY especially the BASS), but once done it was DONE and you just accepted it. With BOUNCING I had 6 or 7 tracks to work with, and on with it i GOT.

Now with the DIGITAL set up all I have to do is record ONE bit of each section of the song correctly and I can re-used it... i thought this'd make things quicker, but it makes it MUCH longer, as i keep re-recording stuff to get it PERFECT, then have to do all the different BITS seperately, and THEN take it all out into a WAV EDITOR to fiddle about to make it SOUND good. Also, funnily enough, although i now have (sort of) LIMITLESS tracks to hand, I've so far stuck to the basic drum, bass, GTR, 2 vocals + 1 other instrument set-up I'm used to, but this may change... also, I am happy to report, although there is of course a constant RISK or GLOSSY HOLLYWOOD OVERPRODUCTION, it does still sound reassuringly CLANKY.

On Saturday i did "If You Need Loving", which went pretty well EXCEPT for at about 6 o'clock when I decided to stick a GTR SOLO in. BRILLIANTLY i was able to pretty easily move things around and stick in an extra VERSE to play over (thus immediately and FINALLY reassuring me that I'd been RIGHT to make the switch to DIGITAL), and then spent a nerve-wracking 30 minutes trying to play it RIGHT. NERVE WRACKING because at 6.30 I had to go downstairs and put the TEA ON, ready for my traditional appointment with TEA and DOCTOR WHO. GRATE this week wasn't it? Next week's ALSO looks FANTASTIC - I can't believe there's only two episodes left! What am i going to DO!?

Anyway, after THAT i fiddled some more and started the drums off for SUNDAY'S action plan, which was "Hey William". I'd originally intended to DO STUFF yesterday, maybe go to the GYMNASIUM, maybe go and see Star Wars again... but i actually spent the whole day indoors. I DID make a big old LASAGNE for my tea, but otherwise i was upstairs playing unnecessarily complicated (but ACE sounding) pipe organ tracks, panning them around, and then COMPING (Technical Term!) three vocal "takes" (oh baby! DIG the TERMAGE!) into one OK one. It was GRATE, and it sounds pretty flipping LOVELY!

It certainly explains why you get so many dull, grey people making DANCE music anyway - it is EXACTLY the sort of thing the appeals to the RAMPANT COMPUTER GEEK in me, it really PUSHES you to make extremely INCREMENTAL music with TINY progressions that you can spend DAYS working on, and it's so much FUN you could quite easily not talk to other human beings for WEEKS and get out of the habit. Expect, by the end of the week, me to have created an experimental symphony where a TRIAD of PULSES dance around each other for an hour, gently ROTATING through the STEREO SPECTRUM.

Hey! I wouldn't be the first!

posted 6/6/2005 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

"a couple of new WIRES to plug into the back of the computer, so I don't have to keep leaning round the back to plug things in" sounds like a QOLED to me
posted 6/6/2005 by Pauly

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