The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I took most of last week plus yesterday off from work. Returning is... well, it's less than pleasant.

During the off-days, my brother came to town for a visit, and we went and did a lot of fun stuff together, including attending Geek Bowl VI, at which our team tied for 23rd place with 80 points. It may not sound like a stellar showing, but the grouping of scores was so tight that we were only 13 points behind the first-place teams. http://geekswhodrink.com/306/Geek%20Bowl%202012/

I also rushed off my entry for SpinTunes, in spite of some annoying technical problems that made the use of my piano impossible. Basically, I can't seem to install Cubase 6 on the laptop - I get unspecified "I/O Errors" whenever I try. Other CDs and DVDs will install to that laptop, so it's not the drive. The Cubase installation CD works in other systems, so it's not the installation media. Pesky pesky.

So, to fix this, I need to either:
1.) Determine the cause of these mysterious I/O errors,
2.) Locate my missing Cubase 5 Artist CD and try that instead of the full version of Cubase 6, or
3.) Try a different DAW.

Whatever I wind up doing, I better do it quick - FAWM starts at midnight tonight!

Question of the Day: What are the most annoying roadblocks you face when trying to record?

Writing lyrics.

QotD: My pain in the ass wife.

Manhattan Glutton wrote:Writing lyrics.

i would say writing good lyrics. i could spit random nonsense all day, in fact i do sometimes, but coming up with something catchy, meaningful, original , funny , adhering to a story, rhyming with orange, etc. is by far the hardest for me. i would say "coming up with interesting chord progressions, and interesting transitions in my songs" but ive never really had either of those in one of my songs...so...

QotD: Flubbing a take. I try to maximize good takes by rehearsing several times, but sometimes, I just keep fucking it up. And it's a vicious cycle, because I fixate on the part I keep fucking up. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE. Often, I have to step away from the whole thing and do something else to clear my brain and fingers.

Also, I frequently ditch otherwise good vocal takes because they're clipping. So, I turn down the mix gain, and shave off other parts (often in the chorus), and sing further from the mic, and sing softer....

Then I realize I have the mix gain cranked (well, +6 dB). I pull it back to between 0 and +3 and voilà, no more clippage. Just like half and hour wasted.

Well, mainly, other people. I pretty much work by myself, so nothing much gets recorded until I have the house to myself. Especially vocals...

I pretty much figure that it's going to take me 10-15 takes to get each part right - vocals, bass, guitars, etc. So I expect that. I tend to try to maximize good takes by ALWAYS recording, even when I'm first learning the parts. Also by setting "mark points" in the track so that I can re-do pieces of the track. That's especially good with vocals - I usually set aside tracks six and seven for the lead vocal, and when I'm first working out the song there will be lots of punch-ins until I have one useable track all the way through the song - "this is how this song goes." Then I'll listen to that good track a couple times, make notes on the lyric sheet on how to sing it (or sing it better), then switch to the other track and repeat the process. Back and forth until, ideally, I have two decent vocal tracks with a minimum of punch-ins.

I did spend a bunch of time recently trying to get a good guitar track with a guitar that (a) doesn't intonate properly, and (b) has something wrong with the electronics (it's always distorted, and turning down the volume control doesn't make it any quieter). After a couple hours of frustration, I pulled out the Strat and nailed it in one.

I have learned that it's generally worth editing and re-printing the lyric sheet after every five or six takes. I do a lot of lyrical tweaking during recording, and by the time I have eight or ten "corrections" on the lyric sheet, I generally screw up enough takes that it's better to just stop, edit, and re-print.

Charles (KA)

Billy's pain in the ass wife.

My biggest roadblock is generally coming up with a song on demand. I'm the sort who needs to get inspired to make music, usually by a chord progression I wake up with and that lyrics just kind of fall into place with.

More recently, being sick a bunch and having a very needy and attention-starved cat are also issues.

Giving Billy's wife a pain in her ass.

Alright, I found my Cubase 5 Artist DVD and it installed successfully. FAWM time!

Well, as soon as I get home from work tonight... *grumble*

usually my vocals. but when i was working on gom, i upgraded to acid 7. after working with it a couple of days, it started doing this odd thing - when i finished recording a clip, it pops up a window asking if you want to keep it. if you close that window, the application's title bar flashes between two different colors of blue and i didn't find any way to get it to stop. the only way to wake it up would be to ctrl-alt-del and force close it. but then it would ask if i wanted to save, so it wasn't actually dead. not sure if there's some other way to wake it up!
i searched the web and found other people with this problem. the only fix proposed? uninstall and reinstall, which makes it stop, temporarily, until a couple more days go by, then repeat.... blah.
i'm expecting the same crap from acid for fawm.
-bill

I've mentioned this before, but I long ago made the decision that I did not want to have to fight the computer when it came time to record. I have a Yamaha AW16G standalone recorder with a built-in 40 gb drive. Ya turn it on and it's ready to record audio. No plugins, no softsynths, none of that. Two built-in XLR mic preamps and a total of 8 tracks recordable at once.

The one problem I did have with the machine, almost from the start, was that the only way to get digital audio OFF the machine was by way of the CD writer, and the original CD writer in the machine was crap - if I was lucky, I'd only have to burn two or three CDs to get a song mix off the machine, or back up the individual tracks. Yamaha was of zero help on this, and the only reason it's not a problem still is that one day my wife was tearing apart an old laptop to see what was inside, and I recognized the CD writer device as being the same shape and size as the one in the recorder. So we swapped that one in and it's been working great so far. When this machine dies and it's time to get a new one, I will definitely go for something where you can get mixes and backups off the machine via USB.

But other than that... compared to any experience I've ever had trying to record to a computer, I've avoided so many obstacles by just having a machine that's ready to record when I'm ready to play, that never has to have a software upgrade.

Charles (KA)

Billy's wife's ass.

/bandwagon

You guys are.so.funny....BWAHAHAHAH!!!!




....ok, I can't lie, I laughed.