Absolutely hands down the most frustrating experience I've had yet on a 39-40 cover, and on a song I was initially so happy to have been handed by The Machine. I curse the loops, you see, but moreover and more severely I curse myself. See, I laid out the drum tracks for this one, and it has a bit of a swing to it, and I painstakingly cut and pasted the loops to simulate that. For all that effort, when I played the guitar and bass and the other guitar and the other couple of guitars, I kept jumping the beats over and over again, despite trying like hell to compensate. Much later when I though I was done, I became annoyed at my lousy timing and took a closer look, seeing as how all my instruments were off by about the same amount in the same places... and damned if the thing didn't swing more than I'd consciously realized. So then I took the loops back apart and tried to put them together all over again, trying now to match the instruments and now struggling with my earlier efforts to rein in the swing... and then deciding that I had to fix the verses as well as the choruses. Final result was hours spent trying to make the thing sound, like, just kind of unsettlingly awkward instead of outright whack. Bleh.Not only do I like the song I've just butchered, I'm also regretful because my wife Gen contributed a fine lead vocal to this one... should've been a big occasion to have a lead vocal by an actual human female adult, let alone one this good. Maybe the first half of the recording is listenable enough to get an idea of what she was up to. Sorry, dear!
Personnel:
Genevieve Broome ~ lead vocal
Rex Broome ~ everything else
First: are you using Garageband for the drum loops? Because it gives you like a zillion different variable "swing" settings... I realize this would have been better news for you before you cut & pasted everything, but...for future reference...
ReplyDeleteAlso: "when The Machine gives me something by Teenage Fanclub I'll record that one on a toy xylophone played backwards and re-recorded off of a cellphone speaker in my shower": LIAR!
Hee... I was going to add a little thing where I acknowledged having mentioned TF before and wondering if I had the power to invoke artists, and then deploying a wish list... but I try to keep the writing part relatively brief.
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