The True Believer Sessions, Day Two

Ah, so that's where the Aux enable button is. Note to self: Effects can be loud if you've got them cranked because you couldn't hear them when they, you know, weren't turned on in the first place. Ow.

Anyway, "Not This Time" is almost done. I'm maybe a little concerned that I overdid the guitars, as I'm not clever enough with EQ and compression to find a distinct sonic home for each track. So there's sort of a bed of guitar sludge that everything else is built on. I could probably kill one or two of the tracks without the song losing anything. Later last night I came up with a guitar part that sorta crept into my head via the delay on the first of many guitar tracks, which has been lovingly dubbed the "AC/DC" part, because it reminds me of the opening bit from "For Those About To Rock."

This isn't to say this song sounds anything like AC/DC, but when you hear it, you might know what I mean.

Couldn't get the computer to talk to the drum machine, so for the time being, we're stuck with the drum sounds from the Korg. I massaged attack velocities as much as I could without getting totally obsessive about it, and threw in some variations here and there so it might almost sound like a real drummer.

Vocals went okay. I actually got two takes that are close enough together that they add some depth without sounding like two separate tracks, thanks in part to some clever editing. I worry a little that this is just straight-up-the-middle vanilla pop/rock, with the spectre of Trevor Rabin's 90124 demos looming over my shoulder. But it's still a really coherent song, and those are few and far between for me. I suspect I'll have it squashed flat and posted either here or to MySpace by some time tomorrow.

I've also learned that SONAR and Outlook don't seem to play well together, as the e-mail program has hung on me twice since I started leaving my projects open for long periods of time. It could be something else, but that's the most logical conclusion.

Now comes the fun part, which is working on songs that aren't already mostly finished.