The True Believer Sessions, Day Three

This is going to take longer than I thought.

Using the Korg for drum sounds is just unacceptable, and is a big part of why "Not This Time" currently sounds like 80s arena rock, so since I still haven't gotten the computer to talk to the drum machine, I'm left with constructing a drum track out of individual samples of a kick drum, snare drum, etc. It's not the easiest way to do things, but it'll work. This has the first song clocking in at over two days' worth of work, and that's for the one that was actually written already.

My roommate, who got the first listen, also suggested I should maybe be a bit meaner with the vocals. It's a good idea, so while I'm fine-tuning, I might as well give that a shot.

I've been toying with this notion of using MySpace as a lab, posting the straight acoustic version of the song, and the first "draft" of the produced version, and try to solicit feedback. I still might try that, but the first draft is going to be succeeded by the second quickly enough that it'll be like it never happened.

Also, I learned that the "remove silence" function isn't really something I want to use regularly, unless I really get down and dirty with the thresholds and see what happens. My attempt at "zeroing out" all the bits of track that didn't have anything going on resulted in lots of little slivers of sound and slivers of silence, which, in practice, sounded an awful lot -- emphasis on "awful" -- like static. So I had to go and effectively "floss" my individual chunks of audio, cleaning out those slivers, which took an hour or so last night.

The upside of completely failing to pull off the "five songs in five days" I was hoping for is that this may turn into a longer record. I was sifting through old files last night and found a number of good candidates to work on. I'm not doing this totally from scratch, by any stretch.