Fall Catalogue

Aside from my solo work, I've got this band I play with, called Fall Catalogue. They're basically the awesomest band ever. Tonight we played a really beautiful show with The Slowest Runner In All The World and Ascent of Everest. They're both awesome, incredible groups with cellists who will one day play in Rasputina.

It was a great show tonight. It surprised me that the highlight of the evening was hearing the other bands. During the first song of Fall Catalogue's set, I managed to play the riffs from both Iron Man and Smoke on the Water. I didn't think it could get much better than that. But it did.

Those other two bands are playing in Baltimore tomorrow night. You should probably go see them. Otherwise you'll be sad and lonely for the rest of your life. Okay, not really that long. But for tomorrow night, I'm not making any promises of happiness or great rock and roll unless you listen up and check it out.

64x30: Cover of the rolling stone?

So, I may not quite be ready to live out Shel Silverstein's dream, but I have set my sites on a different, and deeper desire.

Yes. It's been two days since I emailed the editors of Rolling Stone magazine about my intentions to become internationally famous by recording and releasing sixty-four new songs in the last sixty-four days of my twenties. I still have yet to hear a follow-up requesting more details. Two whole days, people. In a twenty-four hour news cycle, that's the equivalent of....

...long enough to realize it was a pipe dream, writing to them in the first place, especially since I forgot to include a link.

But I haven't given up with trying to get my face on the front of something. I present my latest original composition, Cereal Monogamy, about my longstanding desire to get my face on the cover of Quaker Oat Squares.

64x30: New website

I've started migrating my files from Garageband over to Bandcamp. The new site is at http://eliresnick.bandcamp.com/album/64x30 and will eventually be able to hold all sixty-four songs. Garage band also offers artists the choice to give songs away for free, charge a set amount or let purchasers name their price. I'm going to keep everything free for at least a few more weeks, so download and enjoy.

Take a minute especially to check out last night's creation, Eminently Lovable. My lead guitar came out just beautiful and hauntingly electronic. Through a combination of a dead nine-volt battery in the guitar's balancing circuit, a little bit of radio interference that wouldn't go away until I turned the treble almost off on the amp and my own preference for fingerpicking even on lead parts, the notes are just barely there, but over the fingerpicked classical rhythm guitar they offer a really interesting blend of textures.

I think it's quite possibly the most beautiful recording I've been a part of since I played bass and engineer on a home recording The Casual Occupation's Friday Night. Lobby Gabe for a copy. Hear what I'm remembering, and why I'm so thrilled with my lead tone on Eminently Lovable.

64x30: Dick Cheney and English Class

Yesterday I recorded two songs. The first was a triumph of quick and dirty, single-take, acoustic guitar improvisation. Dick Cheney is just a straightforward blues in E, the lowest, best (and the easiest because rock players practice it the most) guitar-blues key. I'm switching up between chords and lead to compliment my voice and that's about all it needs. Of course, the cuban drum-loop doesn't hurt, either. Let's hear it for royalty-free things that serve as metronomes while simultaneously adding actual content.

English Class is a little bit more refined now. The only piece of cliched writing advice that didn't make it into the lyrics proved to be the guiding force for the recording process here: you don't write; you edit. And if there's anything I've learned about the editing process, it's that it usually involves more writing than the writing process.

After staying up a few hours past my bedtime working on the guitar and vocals and overlaying a rough bass take, I put it aside for this morning. In the morning I decided to start from scratch. There is no force stronger than sleep for getting things done. First thing in the morning, the song was easy to play and easier to sing.

I think overnight I actually learned a lot of the nuances of it that eluded me last night. Also, having tried to play an appropriate bass part over my first, really free guitar part, I understood that I wanted to start out with a rhythm-only guitar line, lay down a simple, basic bass part over that and then see what I could do about lead and fancy things, once the foundation was there.

After playing the guitar and bass for the song and singing one take, I couldn't decide whether it needed harmonica or backing vocals more, so I tried a take where I switched between the two. After that, it didn't sound like it needed anything else.

In fifty-nine more songs, I'm going to get plenty of opportunities to play guitar solos. I'm a lot more excited about getting each song to sound good for what it is. If they need guitar, I'll play it. If they don't, well, I hope I got it out of my system at the end of Electron Directions.

The other really exciting development from last night is that I switched up how I was routing the signal from the mixer to the line-in on my computer, and suddenly the left-right balance is fine. That old, beat up, Californian mixer has some rock-solid, center-detented pan controls after all.

The problem now is that I'm routing my mix into the computer through a headphone amp. Still, I think you'll agree the sound quality has improved 200%. I really hope there's time to go back and re-record the first few tracks at some point, but until I find a lower-distortion solution than the headphone amp, I'm going to rule that dilatory.

64x30: Two more for y'all

So, after that guitar-drenched angst, I've recorded really open, bare arrangements of my next two songs. They sound more like, I don't know, Lucinda Williams and They Might Be Giants. Okay, that's a big range. One of them sounds like Lucinda Williams and the other sounds like They Might Be Giants. This could either be a huge coincidence, or else just a result of the fact that I really like both musicians. But maybe I'm wrong. Check out Electron Directions and Lucinda. What do you think?

On a technical side, I found out the mixer I picked up on tour in LA is not perfect. Whatever is panned to the center is coming out a little to the left. Maybe it's just the outputs or a connection issue, but I'm panning everything a little to the right to try to get it to even out.

Speaking of evening out, I have sixty-one songs left to record in the next sixty-one days. If only I had sixty-one songs already written. I'll be hitting my old notebooks hard, certainly, but if you've got an idea for something I ought to be writing a song about, please let me know.

64x30: First challenges

Well, it's day three of my self-imposed challenge to record sixty-four original songs before I turn thirty.

Already I've wondered if I should have called it "sixty-four going on thirty," and Chris suggested 64-4-30.

But this hasn't been my biggest challenge.

Actually, after I set up two very different mics for mid-side encoded vocals, two very accurate mics halfway between my head and hands to capture all the non-musical authenticity of a take and a clean/dirty pair of condensers in front of a guitar amp that's up on a table, pointed at the backs of all the other ones anyway, I found an actual challenge.

My rackmounted eight-input firewire recording device won't turn on.

So instead I've got everything plugged into a tiny Mackie mixer and running in stereo into my computer's line-in, for some lower quality, noisier analog to digital conversion.

It is not an ideal situation. I like to record, as above, several different angles and tones of a sound source, and then mix them all together, spending all day adding different effects to each angle, and moving them back and forth from left to right. My computer has one stereo input, so I get to make a stereo mix in my headphones and then that's what I get. There's no adding an effect to the guitar if the guitar take is on the same track as the vocal take. I've got to commit early and redo whatever doesn't work from scratch.

But the real challenge in recording any song is still, as it has always been for me, letting go of it.

So even though I'd like to spend a year recording this first song, I'm going to let you hear what I did with it in just a couple hours of takes, with no real mixing beyond some eq on the voice and a few volume adjustments to get the guitars audible without drowning the vocal. The drums are programmed and I haven't even added bass, but I'm not sure it needs it. I think with just one voice, three guitars and, basically, three digital drumsets, this is getting where it needs to be.

I don't know, though. It's an undending search. So it's fitting that the title of this first song is, "When I Find God."

Sixty-Four by Thirty

My work is not done, but I'm on summer vacation.

A few trips to the pool, a few good home-cooked meals. Some good times with friends.

A last gasping grasp at youth before the big tres cero.

Through my childhood I've wanted to be a singer, a songwriter, someone who records music.

I've played shows in different cities, even out of the country. I've written songs people have listened to without meeting me.

But in the prime of a life spent studying music, poetry, songwriting, the history of American music, the culture of rock and roll, I know I can do more.

In the sixty-four days of now through my birthday, I am going to record sixty-four original songs.

They won't paint a picture of me. They might not explain your life to you. They may not be the greatest work of a great composer, toiling in obscurity beneath the digital noise of a million equal minds pushing that same rock up the same road.

They probably won't even all be great songs.

But the unrecorded life is lived only on faith, and I am not always a person of such strong faith.

So today, after months of choosing a project, rejecting everything I know I cannot sustain, I am sitting down as one of the oldest young men on the planet to do my work.

And after my work is done, I hope you will enjoy it.