On Thursday, I received an email saying that a parcel from Temu would be delivered to me. As all their parcels so far have been delivered to the kibbutz 'post office', I walked there after lunch (another 2000 steps there and back to my credit). Whilst there were a few parcels from Temu, there was nothing for me, so I started composing in my mind a letter to the delivery service as I walked home. My wife came home a bit later and in her hand was the missing parcel: it seems that this time the delivery was to my home! This parcel contained the tuner pedal, so in the evening I got out the pedalboard and fixed the tuner to the right hand side of the board, connecting both power and signal leads. I tuned my guitars - both the Washburn and the Stagg were slightly flat. It's much easier tuning with this pedal than with the little tuner that I attach to the end of the guitar, and I can also now tune when there's a lot of noise going on (e.g. during a rehearsal) as the pedal is not affected by environmental factors.
I devoted most of Friday to the recording process: on Thursday I had been running through my repertoire of traditional tunes, playing them through the octave pedal and the chorus preset of the multi-effects pedal. As a result, I decided to record myself playing 'My Lagan love' live. This took a few attempts but eventually I was able to play the whole thing through without mistakes. The sound is somewhat strange. I might persuade my wife to film me playing this song then upload it to YouTube.
I then recorded a guitar part for 'Looking for his tribe'; as I wrote last week, my original recording was a mess so yesterday I played a simple part. I added this fairly low to the mix and as a result it's not obvious what the guitar is. It's an unfortunate coincidence that the guitar through the octave pedal sounds something like the the flute organ that plays the solo, so some may think that the solo was played on guitar; no.
Once the guitar part was finished, it was time to record vocals. Every time I made a mistake or fluffed a line, I would restart from the beginning of which ever section I was singing at the time. In other words, the first take had the first verse complete, but then I fluffed a line in the middle of the second verse, so the second take started from the beginning of the second verse. Eventually I had a complete vocal, so I cleaned up each take then mixed them all down to one file that then underwent tuning. A few more manipulations and I was ready to start mixing the complete song; this took much longer than usual because I made a silly mistake.
Normally the process is that I create a mix in the multitrack software program and save it to a file; I normalise and compress that file then listen to the result, noting any changes that have to be made (normally this means reducing the volume of the vocals). This process goes on and on until I achieve the sound that I want, where each mix deletes the previous mix. For some reason, I forgot to keep using the same name for the output file, and as a result I had created several mix files but I was always listening to the same mix! Eventually I figured out what I had done wrong and shortly thereafter created a good mix.
But whilst listening to this mix all the way through, I noticed that it was hard to understand the words, especially in the last verse. I then remembered a trick that I frequently forget, so I'll document it here: I make a copy of the main vocal track, saving the copy to mono. I then run a high-pass filter on the copy, starting from about 700 Hz: this produces a very thin trebly vocal that normally has to have its volume increased by about 300 percent. This mono track then gets added to the mix without any effects (or maybe a little reverb); when done correctly, it adds upper end to the vocal without adding volume and makes hearing the words easier. Theoretically this could be done by adding subtle equalisation to the main vocal, but I find using this technique more effective for achieving the last elusive part of the mixing process. With the extra vocal track in place, I still had to make another four or five mixes before the final result was achieved.
I would like to upload the sound to SoundCloud then add a link to it, but that's not possible at the moment as I seem to have forgotten my password and the site won't send me a new one.
Although it's very early, I am thinking of contributing this song to the Yom Kippur song evening. The lyrics turned out to be far more autobiographical than I might have originally intended.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 68 | Weekend migraines | Maccabi Tel Aviv, Migraine | |
| 555 | I'll never get those wasted hours back | Programming, Email, Problem solving, Nick Hornby | |
| 930 | Sir George Martin, RIP | Obituary, Beatles | |
| 1204 | The Tel Aviv saxophone quartet | Ambient music | |
| 1379 | Sometimes it takes a long time for the light to go on in my head | MIDI | |
| 1588 | That's all, say amen, close the door | DBA |
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