should be a light work week…and that means musical progress.

i didn’t get a ton done today but here’s what i did:

- relistened to my recordings of ‘king forever’ and ‘not the end’ to see how i felt about them after it had been awhile. the former is still missing something and needs parts of the vocals redone. the latter needs vocal work too, but it is just about where i want it musically. its pretty minimalist as far as arrangement goes, but i was thinking when i listened to it today that i really like the song — and that is rare.

- figured out tempo and did placement tracks for the next two songs i’m tackling, which are ‘beautiful’ and ‘great’, not necessarily in that order. its been nice to jump between a couple if i get stuck on one.

- figured out/practiced the ebow part that got stuck in my head for ‘beautiful’. as if the ebow wasn’t tricky enough it also requires the use of a slide, which i have zero experience playing. if my head hears increasingly complicated parts that i have to figure out it might drive me nuts.

- did some reading about vocal recording and the use of a compressor. interesting reading. on vocal takes so far i had set the input gain on the mic based on what i thought the loudest note in the song was and went from there. not bad except the rest of the song is much quieter and really only the loud part is in the ideal decibel range. then i added compression stuff afterward which comes out okay but you can tell something was done to the vocals. so what i think i can do is run the compressor while i’m recording instead of afterward; which hopefully will let the vocals stay in the ideal range most of the time and then only compress when i hit the high stuff. i’m sure i’ll have to play around with it awhile before it works, but i’m hoping it will yield better results than my other tries.

so anyway, not bad for a day’s work. hope to get much more done this week.