Sequencing "House with no door"

I see that blogging is a habit which has to be maintained: if one neglects it for a few days, it becomes harder and harder to return. This December has been a fairly barren month in terms of blogging probably because I've actually been more than busy at work although not with subjects which I can blog about (not because they're secret but rather they're either mundane or esoteric, requiring too much explanation). It's true that I did suffer a period of emptiness after the first doctoral exam which was at the beginning of the month, and it's true that for the past few days I've been suffering from some unspecified viral infection which has left me lethargic and suffering pain in my lower legs, but these are just excuses....

When looking for something to occupy my time, I decided to return to my continuing project of recording covers of Van der Graaf Generator songs. This project was curtailed in the summer when first I had great difficulty in recording vocals to my version of 'Pilgrims' and then almost permanently mothballed when it seemed that I would never sing again after the pertussis episode. But now, a few months later, my voice has returned and so has my appetite for recording. 

There has always been one song which I knew that I would probably record - 'House with no door'. After a few false starts (one promising version began with marimba arpeggios, a device which unfortunately I have used too often, especially in 'Pilgrims'), I plumped for an electric piano playing simple chords as the basis for the recording. I ended up with a version which sounds just like one of my songs, only even simpler, as the chord sequence is very scalar (this caused me problems with the solos - I like complicated chord sequences!).

During the sequencing process, my headphones stopped working properly so I had to buy a new pair. Perusing the headphones on sale in the local mall (two different shops), I discovered that the kind of 'phones (or 'cans' as Peter Hammill and the boys used to call them) which I had previously (closed with a generous amount of foam) were no longer being sold; there are closed 'phones (but not with a perfect seal) but they all come with microphones attached. This actually is not necessarily a bad thing. After connecting the 'phones and microphone to the computer and making a simple test recording, I was pleased to discover that the microphone actually has a very good frequency response and is very clean - no background hum or clicks.

Once I had my backing track ready, I commenced singing. Although I know the song very well, it still took a few takes to get a good recording - there was one line in particular with which I had trouble phrasing. After about an hour, I comped together three separate takes, performed the necessary note correction and then commenced the aurally exhausting process of mixing, with most of the time spent on getting a good vocal sound. I discovered two things about the headphones/microphone combination: very little equalisation (tone control) is necessary but unfortunately the insufficient closure of the headphones along with the adjacency of the microphone to the 'phones had caused a great deal of leakage - the microphone was recording the instrumental track along with the vocal. Normally this isn't too much of a problem, but there were many rim shots from the drums being picked up and these were causing phasing in the final mix. I cleaned as many of these as I could and made a final mix.

Listening to the track over the next few days whilst wearing my producer's hat, I became aware that the instrumental section was limping; in order to correct this, I recorded a new solo over the second half and also spiced up the drumming. This version was fairly intimate with an 'in the face' vocal (very little reverb or gimmickry) and was then deemed to be a winner.

Or maybe not: after a few more days of listening, I realised that there was a cognitive mismatch between the lyrics (somewhat sad and certainly detached) and the music (somewhat happy). A new, spacier, version was called for. I spent most of yesterday creating that version. I didn't have to add a single note (although I probably removed a few); instead I used different instrumentation and moved the parts around. I found a rather strange pad sound to be the basis of the sound and worked from there. 

The beauty of computer recording is that I don't have to record a new vocal track: as long as the new version is in the same key, at the same speed and of the same structure, the existing vocal will automatically sit correctly on top of the music. When mixing, I added a 2kb boost to my vocal along with a hefty amount of reverb. Unfortunately, the leakage which I mentioned previously came back in spades: although there was no drum track with which the phantom rim shots could phase, these phantom shots appeared out of nowhere, coming and going seemingly at random.

Last night I wasn't too convinced about the new version, but having listened to it several times this morning, I think that this will be 'the one'. Of course, I'll keep the original version - it will be a 'bonus track'.