The True Believer Sessions, Day One

Okay, since I decided to use all this free time to record, might as well document it, right? This afternoon I got my Dunkin Donuts fix on for the combination caffeine and sugar rush, and got to it.

First, a quick aside. The EP is probably going to be called True Believer, and it might end up being a song cycle of sorts. Originally, "True Believer" was, and still may be, a song title -- I'll give things names and then try to write words to support the name sometimes, for lack of a better process, but I got to thinking that I could have a certain type of personal or ideological intransigence be the basis for each of the pieces. At least one song I've already written should fit the theme, too. This kind of framework might actually help me, lyrically, because I'm notoriously bad at coming up with lyrics out of nowhere.

Anyway, I figured I'd hit the low-hanging fruit first, to try to get into some sort of rhythm. I haven't used the desktop studio for much more than recording sketches of ideas for a good couple of years now, with a few notable exceptions. One of those exceptions is a song I wrote about somebody I used to play in a band with called "Not This Time." I had a pretty rough demo of it done out, but more or less every track could be improved upon. The drums were just a single loop, so there were no dynamics there at all. I think I had used SONAR's Amp Sim module to do the guitars, and now that I've got the POD, I figured I could get something going there pretty easily.

I messed around with sounds for a while, got bored, and switched to bass. I would have liked to have played the part without a pick, but that just wasn't going to happen. Anyway, it allowed me to actually get something recorded to disk, and then I could audition guitar tones against it, the drum loop, and my old, crappy vocal from the initial recording. After cycling through a bunch of sounds, I settled on some reverb-heavy variations on the "Jazz Clean" preset for the main verse part, with a delay that matches the tempo. I'm not sure if that will introduce some weird harmonic elements down the road, but we'll see.

I tried a track with roughly the same sound using both pickups on the guitar, playing the part in its entirety, but it was a mess. Better to split the "original," acoustic version between bass and just the top chords on the six-string. I did add some beef to the chorus and the bridge, and added a little arpeggiated figure during the turnarounds.

Then it was time for distortion. First pass was brutally bad. Too much overdrive and too much playing, and ow, lots of sliding power chords do wonders for your hand muscles. But it was necessary for me to do so I could see what shouldn't have been there. Definitely giving some heft to the bridge, but now there's too much in the choruses, so taking out that first clean guitar may be the answer.

I'm not a student of the massively multi-tracked guitar, so three may be enough. It was enough to warrant a break and a beer. When I came back, my roommate's cat was on the desk again, but whenever he'd actually put a paw up on the mixing console, he'd take it back by the time I got my camera phone out.

Next up, drums. The plan is to go MIDI, but to use the DR-660 instead of the cheeseball synth drums on the Korg. I'm hoping the mapping holds up, so I don't have to actually hook up the drum machine to record the parts. I'll probably wait until tomorrow morning to add vocals.