big surprise, right? most common phrase in my life.

i’m usually pretty good about writing the same day i do stuff, but i forgot the other day. so here’s the other day and today all wrapped up in a nice little package.

drum tracks. now that the mood has struck me once or twice to work on some of this stuff late at night, i’ve realized there are limitations. obviously i can’t track any instruments or vocals at 1 a.m. so i’m limited to either mixing or sequencing instruments. i can work on drums for any song as long as i’ve figured out the tempo in advance and maybe recorded a placement track…so i figure that maybe from here on out i’ll try to go ahead and get the tempo and maybe hats and placers done for every song first so i have them all started. that way i can crank out drums during the quiet hours and not spend the loud hours doing quiet stuff. make sense? brilliant. also we’re going on vacation for a week this summer, and if the mood strikes i could sequence some stuff there since all i’d need for that is a pair of headphones.*

anyhoo, with that in mind, between the other day and today i’ve done the majority of the drums for two new pieces, ‘glory to your name’ and ‘cannot escape’. both are instances (especially the latter) where i’ve become more excited about the song while i started building them; which is good, as it creates more motivation to work on them further. i am starting to hear some of the electric parts come out now, which is nice. there’s nothing worse than not hearing anything and just messing around to find a part.

okay, to be honest there are plenty of things worse than that. and i suppose most of the time it’s fun; it’s only now and then that it is frustrating.

the whole process seems to be going well overall and moving forward. but the project is so large that it seems to move very slowly since i can’t work on it all the time. it occurred to me the other day that i might do well to impose some kind of deadline upon myself — one more specific than “sometime this year.” so here goes thinking out loud till i can come up with one.

i’d really like to have all the home recordings done by early fall so i can get them out and start getting feedback to narrow them down to the final 11 ish. so maybe i’m looking at like late august to mid september. i don’t really know when fall starts. but that seems pretty reasonable at the moment.

so there we have it. a deadline. let’s see how that works for me.

*through my experience sequencing in garageband on a laptop i have learned this: i cannot build a track without headphones or speakers. i tried it once, building a track just using the small speakers on my computer. it sounded fine. then i put the headphones on and it sounded completely different. the computer speakers just aren’t loud enough to hear what everything actually sounds like, so you really can’t sequence that way. i bought a pair of nice sony headphones in college on a gift card and its been one of the most useful purchases i’ve ever made. i would recommend getting a similar pair if you’re going to do this stuff.