Minor updates. Dealing with a relapse or new flu most of the last week, so it isn't a happy journal entry. Finally defeated a tech problem that had kept my hands tied on how to work around what appeared to be a software limitation. Turned out a simple manual latency setting was required to fix the issue, though I'd already done that before, it had reset it's self to defaults. So no more immediate barriers are foreseen to get actual tracking moving.

Thinking of switching to a dif break in song from 'Alison' to a song already recorded named 'I want to be bad'  because the production is so much more complicated on 'Alison'. Maybe next one I'll get it, when there's not so many software re-learning hangs. Not sure either will be in the '30 years' project. Really just have to see and hear some progress on something now.

Okay, where's the beef? Or the track? As is so common, I got pulled into something else for a while. Also, software glitches and anti-help menus frustrate me more easily now that I'm just a grumpy old man, yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, while trying to decode the help menu.  This album is #3 on my do it or die work priority list. Oh, I also have a real life, boring as that may be, and stuff happens in it. However, please check back. This track will happen soon. Or that hook
"Alison, where are you now, and do you remember me? Alison, I wonder now, did you ever care for me.:"  will loop in my head until I lose that spec of sanity I may still have.

Don't give up! Close to cracking the drum tracking code. I've been tempted to actually use a real drummer. It's the only instrument I never really played well enough to use for recording tracks. The only thing is, I hate having musicians in the studio. Mainly cause most of them will steal your equipment as soon as you're away.

Basic tracks will be up by this weekend. Weird techy things about doing drum tracks via midi and samples, even if a drummer plays the triggers for MIDI data. There's all sorts of MIDI editors to auto correct timing, then auto mess it up, so it doesn't sound inhumanly perfect or give it human "feel".

Also strange to old engineers, we used to go through major efforts to gate real drums to get rid of the natural acoustics of the drum booth, as drum tones would bleed over into open drum mics from parts of the kit that weren't being played. i.e. tom tom mics picked up the snare drum as a hollow ambient noise, so adding a gate closed the mics until the toms were actually played.

Now there is a 20 minute tutorial involving 34 complex steps with effects and application techniques to recreate the bleed over effect from drum samples to simulate the drum booth that we used to work so hard to cover up. A great deal of flawless digital recording software is being designed and incorprated to recreate the flaws in analog recording we once sought to get rid of at every chance. So in the old days, whenever I missed the levels and caused tape saturation (distortion) it wasn't really a mistake. It was just a future ingenuis insight to modern effects!

I'm going to just refer to this project as '30 years.' The album is songs written, and some previously recorded over a 30 year time frame. 

Progress: Very familiar issues. I use Sonar Producer X2 software on a quad core PC I built. It has a 64 bit version of Windows that is strictly for recording, but has a boot menu for two other operating systems that all share file data from a secondary internal hard drive. Right, it's boring stuff. 

Today I scratched the surface of the song 'Alison' , meaning the start of sequencing the drum tracks. It's painfully slow because I no longer know the best way to do this. It's nice Sonar includes 1.4 million different drum kit combinations, and dozens of ways to access and record them, but really. I just wanted to do a human sounding 80s drum track, not launch a Space Shuttle, which has less buttons I'm sure.

I'm sure if I survive, all those options will be nice. I've already got about 500 hours logged in doing overdubs and post production with Sonar X, and am very impressed with the power. But as expected, no creative flow at the start line, just tech issues. Partly, cause I don't want to just use sample loops. I knew this going in. Much of this week will be spent referencing tech manuals. The glamorous side of recording.

This won't hurt the song production in this case. It's been looping in my head non-stop. I hope it doesn't sound as annoying once tracked. Usually not. Once the tracks are down, the song loop in my head will stop. And then it will go to the next one I left unrecorded over the 30 years. 

Trying something new. Maybe interesting, boring, embarrassing, but we’ll see. Something like the real life of RRJ kind of thing. Mostly this will be going over the recording process of an original song from beginning to end, and all the stuff that fills in around that.

So if you can check back once a day or so if you are up for helping me with this little experiment. I think having someone following my work progress will help production. And you may learn some studio recording tricks, and what the gear does. I really don’t know. This stuff is boring and tedious to me, so it’s hard to say how another might see it.

The Song ahead is just called ‘Alison’. It was written in the 80s. It is pretty much an 80s song, so not trying to be pop. I’ve not laid down my own useable tracks in ten years now. So this song project will be like getting in shape and re-honing the studio perforce skills for more important project goals.

There are other projects that require a time slot too. So if you can, hang with me for a while on these friends! Until next time...