A story
Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2011 1:01 am
I was visiting my parents for the holidays and I was pretty bored. I saw a bunch of sites that were run by a bunch of friends of each other, and one of them had people posting clever music that wasn't like anything I'd heard before. There were only like six different titles but there was a lot of really neat music written for those titles. I noticed that they had an open invitation for people to submit songs for the next title. I couldn't think of any ideas for it though.
A few weeks later, they posted another title, and I thought that would be a pretty good one for a guitar song that had been knocking around in my head for a while, and there didn't seem to be any rules about using a pre-existing song, so I figured I should just record that song and use it. The problem was that at the time I didn't have a guitar, though, and I only barely knew how to play a couple of chords on one. So I went to a pawn shop and bought a guitar for $75. It had a cracked bridge and the strings were rusted and the action was way too high. I also didn't have any picks, but I had a bunch of failed CD-R burns, so I whittled one of those down into something like a pick. Then I taught myself all the chords I needed for the song, but I couldn't get all the way through the recording in a single take, because my hand would cramp up and my fingers would get really sore. Up until that point I had mostly done electronic music, so I decided I'd just record the chords I needed and then load them into my sampler/sequencer. I also didn't have any sort of multitrack recording, so I ended up burning the sequenced guitar track to a CD, and then sang into my computer's microphone while listening to the CD. But I had barely any idea how to sing, and my phrasing was all messed up, and then thanks to timing differences I still had to edit the vocal track into samples that I added back into the original sequencer track. But hey, it was my first guitar-based song.
Anyway, it was terrible and deservedly lost, but it was ten years ago today and you guys are still stuck with me.
A few weeks later, they posted another title, and I thought that would be a pretty good one for a guitar song that had been knocking around in my head for a while, and there didn't seem to be any rules about using a pre-existing song, so I figured I should just record that song and use it. The problem was that at the time I didn't have a guitar, though, and I only barely knew how to play a couple of chords on one. So I went to a pawn shop and bought a guitar for $75. It had a cracked bridge and the strings were rusted and the action was way too high. I also didn't have any picks, but I had a bunch of failed CD-R burns, so I whittled one of those down into something like a pick. Then I taught myself all the chords I needed for the song, but I couldn't get all the way through the recording in a single take, because my hand would cramp up and my fingers would get really sore. Up until that point I had mostly done electronic music, so I decided I'd just record the chords I needed and then load them into my sampler/sequencer. I also didn't have any sort of multitrack recording, so I ended up burning the sequenced guitar track to a CD, and then sang into my computer's microphone while listening to the CD. But I had barely any idea how to sing, and my phrasing was all messed up, and then thanks to timing differences I still had to edit the vocal track into samples that I added back into the original sequencer track. But hey, it was my first guitar-based song.
Anyway, it was terrible and deservedly lost, but it was ten years ago today and you guys are still stuck with me.
