| << Enjoying the weather | 2005 > June | T minus 22 hours >> |
T minus 3 days ::
3 days until I leave for Sweden to record... Finished writing the vocal parts and redoing sounds on one track Tuesday night. Despite better intentions, didn’t get much done musically Wednesday and Thursday. Took care of a number of more mundane preparations at least.
Wednesday I was at the bank moving money and on impulse asked for a new ATM card since mine isn’t always read properly by supermarket terminals. Friday I tried to get cash and the machine swallowed and destroyed my card! Went to the bank 10 minutes before closing, and while I can’t get a new Visa debit card in time to leave the country on Wednesday (which is OK, I have credit cards), they gave me a new ATM-only card. Whew.
Thursday-Friday: cleared 9 GB of disk space, in preparation for installing Reason and having some breathing room in the studio. Cleaned up and organized all the Logic documents.
Friday night I printed 30+ pages of transcribed digital piano parts for the 6 songs with piano. At least two of them I’m confident in being able to re-perform on a real piano (the more human sounds to balance all the synthetic ones, the better). One piece has a classical feel and would very much benefit from a real piano sound. Parts of it are composed and though a little technically challenging, doable, but others are improvised, quirky, fast and non-repetitive. I practiced that on and off for hours without solid progress, and worked myself up into a state of performance anxiety. But Saturday morning was better and by evening I could play some big chunks of it and felt a lot better. Today I’m even getting close to nailing the hard part. Re-playing this one may work out, but worst case, we keep the digital piano tracks in parts.
Saturday I also got Reason installed and made sure I could open all of the documents Jorge sent along with his mixes. Good, we’ll be able to re-balance his sounds if necessary.
I also started reworking the last track which hadn’t been revisited since Christoffer’s feedback in January. He’d mentioned a split in the middle of the song, but there were three different places it seemed he might have been referring to. It should be sparser—until where? I pondered that for awhile and made my own decision. Removed a big fat layer, moved the busy main sound way back in the mix, made it fade in and out as it develops, replaced the busy piano part (which sounded annoyingly artificial because it was performed on a plastic keyboard before getting the RD-700) with a much more minimal piano part, through a twisted reverb.
Oops, there’s the other string part that needs a chart. Done. And there’s that oboe line (Christoffer plays it, I think) ... oops, I wrote an A2 which does not exist on most oboes. We’ll deal.
| << Enjoying the weather | 2005 > June | T minus 22 hours >> |