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.