A Saga Of Suburban Recording
Tales of America includes...
I posted the paragraph below (the one after all the beg buttons) yesterday, but some readers prefer Thursday “Links” posts over Friday “regular” posts and vice versa (which is just fine by me - that’s why we have both kinds here!), so I wanted to make sure to thank all of my subscribers - Thursday people, Friday people, both kinds, new, newer, and those who’ve been here awhile so I can give this as much visibility as possible. We’re growing! Please hit the “Share” button to let your guitarist, vocalist, songwriting, recording, producing or just plain general music lover friends know about us! Do it (and I might just post more pictures of my adorable cat…)!
Hey! There’s a handy button for that….
And that…
So, (finally, sheesh..) the paragraph from yesterday’s post: “For new (and newer) subscribers, Michael Acoustic sort of builds on itself, and we’ve covered a lot of ground over the last year and a half. A few months ago I posted a series of “Retrospectives” - several collections of links to where we started and how far we’ve come that made it a little easier to see and utilize the beginnings of this newsletter as we’ve built upon topics like guitar basics, music theory, songwriting, “the business” and more. Find them (and everything else!) at The Archive. Scroll down to the August 2022 posts to find the “Retrospective” indexes, and thanks for joining us!” Credit: me
Last Week’s Bonus Round - which is another thing I love doing, and it’s only in Friday “regular” posts (neener, neener…):
Two weeks ago the Bonus Round had clues for Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” and last week we sadly learned of David Crosby’s passing. I was wondering if they had ever played together, either in the studio or on stage. The probably unsurprising answer is yes! You’ll see where last week’s “Subtitle clue” fits:
“Crosby, Stills and Nash with Tom Petty perform "For What It's Worth" at the 1997 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, when CSN and Buffalo Springfield were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Credit: YouTube
For today I’m continuing with some thoughts on my recent adventures with home recording and trying to get decent vocal and guitar tracks down to send off to folks who are going to be helping me get this song out the door, mastered, and released. At this point I’m hoping all the things that could go wrong, and sorta did go wrong, are behind me now (riiiiight….). Whatever, we’ll take it as it comes, though what’s already come and gone is replacing batteries in two of my guitars at the same time (Huh, why am I seeing weak signals and weirdly acting plugin fluctuations? Oh…), new strings on one of them (freakin’ G string, man!), and as I said last week, relearning all the stuff I’d forgotten about Logic Pro X and finicky signal chains and whatever! I was texting with my daughter last night (btw - she’s an Acapella app ROCKSTAR!!), and sent her a video of what was probably “Take 1000” of a scratch track I was recording (scratch track, no less, sheesh!) which ended most of the way through with a Very Bad Word. Amusing, if frustrating. “Take 1001” is in the can now, even though I screwed up a chord in the outro, but it wasn’t important, we’ll talk about that in a minute.
Here’s my setup with the “Giant Beats Display” and “Giant Time Display” I talked about last week. I prefer the visual “metronome” to the aural one. I position the chord chart for the song (it’s copyrighted, poachers - do your worst, but pay me!!) close to the “Giant Beats Display” and catch the measure and beat numbers as they progress out of the corner of my eye while I’m playing. Not optimal, but as I’m concentrating on chordal perfection I tend to lose the sound of the “click” if I have it on headphones, so the visual reference works better for me. Your mileage may vary.
Note: why “chordal perfection” is funny: When I texted my daughter I was on “Take 1000” she responded with, “Hahahaha are you being a perfectionist?” - I know she just wanted to say “again”. Kidzzz….
So, why did I not care, despite my perfectionist tendencies, about screwing up a chord in the scratch track outro? That sort of leads to “what’s a scratch track?” My “scratch track” is just me playing the chords on guitar to the song I’m going to record with absolutely strict adherence to the beat (hence the “Giant Beats Display”). Every measure has to come in on the downbeat (the “one”). That’s going to be less strict on the final vocal and guitar tracks because staying exactly on the 1 beat sounds a little unnatural for most songs (unless you’re the drummer, but they get it). But the scratch guitar track is for me to listen to on headphones as I track the vocals. I’ll have notes written on the chord/lyrics chart (including numbering each phrase by measures) and arrangement markers on the Logic Pro tracks (intro, verses, chorus, bridge, tag/out, outro), but the only aural clues I’ll have while tracking vocals are the chord change patterns on the scratch track. Since the outro is just guitar chords to a strum finish and has no vocals, screwing up a chord on the scratch track outro wasn’t important enough to me to do a “Track 1002”. Also it was late at night and I was getting pretty sick of this song by then anyway. Back at it for vocal tracking today though. Why was I recording late at night, you ask (even if you didn’t)? Well…let me explain…
So, the answer is a kind of home recording studio oddity, though probably not unique by any means. My “studio” is a bedroom in my house with carpeted floors and rugs over that, and walls and ceiling that I hung a lot of acoustic treatment tiles and acoustic blankets and such on. Pretty typical, probably. Unfortunately, my house is on a corner lot, and my studio/converted bedroom is on the side of the house that faces a fairly well traveled road between the nearby city and the suburb where I live. In the daytime I get enough traffic noise to defeat the acoustic treatment and interfere with recording (in the summer it’s really bad - someone in my neighborhood has one of those annoying scooter things that go reeeeeeeee - insert Old Man Withers shaking fist ineffectually here). Later in the evening traffic is minimal, so that’s when I record. Kind of a first world problem, but, you know, perfectionist…
So enough for today, I think. I’ll probably continue with this hard hitting documentary journalism about recording my song for a bit longer, so let me know if you have comments, questions, or just want me to move on to something else…
What I’m Listening To: “Out Here There’s A Big Sky”
Bonus Round: …. Saying Goodbye.
Cheers and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic
The visual of you on your porch shaking your fist a some teenager on a scooter probably making door dash deliveries is comical for me.