The True Believer Sessions, Day Four

Now that's more like it.

As painstaking as it may have been, replacing the synth drums with the "constructed" sample track made all the difference in the world. At the very least, "Not This Time" sounds like good 80s arena rock now. It shouldn't really surprise me that a solid drum track can be the difference between a song sounding good and sounding bad, right?

I still haven't created the "artist" page on MySpace so that I don't slam my available bandwidth (not that I know what kind of available bandwidth I've got to work with, really), so you'll have to take my word for it until tomorrow.

Detail work was the order of the day once I got the drum track arranged, including but not limited to:

• Getting the vocal levels right, both the track level and that of the individual wave files, which meant dropping the verses down a bit and raising the choruses when I've got to compete with eight million guitars.
• Cutting and pasting the vocal at the end to excise the one that "got away." It would suck to have the tune rock out for the first four minutes, then get ruined with a sour note right at the end. This was one of those things that I didn't think was too bad when I recorded it, which made it an intimidating amount of work to re-record once I had twiddled knobs past the point of recognition.
• Fixing lengths of some of the longer drum samples to make them more realistic. For example, I'd kill the decay of the sloshy hi-hat so it ends when the next note hits. The same principle applied to creating a better "choked" hi-hat than the sample, which was way too short and sounded unnatural.
• Killing one of the clean guitar tracks in the chorus. For some reason, I was super sloppy on the first chord, and it sounded way out of whack, in terms of tuning, compared to everything else. This required some toying with the levels of the other guitars, mainly the "AC/DC distorted" track, to make sure the chorus still had the requisite oomph.
• The fade-out. I was tempted to have it start sooner, before the last note, but there's something about the guitar orchestra at the end that I really like.
• Then, the final touch was doubling up the flammed tom note in the fill-in before the bridge, because the default levels on those tom samples is brutally low. Even maxing out the track volume wasn't cutting it. It's a tiny detail, but it's the kind that, done right at the end, puts a smile on your face because you feel like you've dotted all your i's and crossed all your t's at that point.

Somewhere along the line -- and I think I hinted at this yesterday -- the rules of the game changed. Obviously, I've only got one song under my belt after four days of work. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, I guess, but I knew that. So the two options are to leave it at the one tune or to expand the project in terms of scope, resources or both. I'm leaning toward the latter, although if writer's block hits me hard, I still have this one thing to show for it. Seeing as how I tend to lay around the apartment on weekends when I don't have much of anything planned, I should be able to devote those hours to this record, at the very least.

Any remaining hours tonight will be sifting through old recorded ideas and seeing which might have legs. I did a little of this a couple of nights ago, and was encouraged with what I found. Whether or not I can remember what chords I was actually playing on some of these snippets is a totally different kind of flying, all together.