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.
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