As I mentioned in the previous post, Leo Abrahams told me what I truly needed to hear last week. I’m sure he won’t mind me putting this bit into the public domain:
“Put all the shit to one side and just finish it, because its inevitable that you will – so might as well do it in a timely fashion and a good mood.”
It was the “good mood” bit that hit home. Since coming back from his place, I have had a new-found enthusiasm for the songs, and have enjoyed the challenge of some guitar takes. The lyrics (mostly Maurice’s admittedly) are really pretty amazing and the guitar parts just needed a bit more space to come alive to support the words. I’ve been stripping it all back and rebuilding some of the songs – the process I started last week, and it has been a lot of fun. No doubt there will be future wobbles, but I think I know deep down that this record is worth finishing.
I had a bit of a beard with Riversong – the demo was recorded at 122bpm, and for some inexplicable reason I decided to do the production version at 120. So I built up the drum machine tracks and synths at that tempo only to find that those 2bpm really made a difference to the energy. I played it to my wife and she agreed that there was just a bit less bounce to it all. All I can say is thank goodness for the existence of the Sync-Gen Pro. I still had all the drum machine patterns in the machines’ memories, so just had to wire them up again and hit “go” on the sequencer to multitrack them back in at the right tempo. It works so well it’s amazing… makes life so much easier. I was also able to clock the Juno 60’s arpeggiator to the little TR-606 and lock it all up at double speed to get some lovely effects. I appreciate this is all meaningless without hearing the damn music, but it won’t be long now.
So – the plan this week is to get a few more vocals and backing vocals down. I’ve also discovered the wonders of the iZotope RX-2 audio restoration plugin. You just feed it the background noise you want to get rid of (in my case a humming fridge and the hiss from the Zoom) and it just does it without destroying your sound. Awesome!