Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Dry Run for "The Sanctuary Song" Recorded

Twenty-three minutes were recorded to disk in the much-heralded dry run.  One thing conclusive is there will be another one.  Perfection was not (cough) precisely achieved but it's most pleasing to get lay one down.

The audio was captured as a high-resolution AIFF, chopped up somewhat in Fission, sent off to GarageBand for some EQ and compression and the mixed down to MP3 suitable for upload.  That file now sits on the Desktop ... mocking me (larfs).

Now there's the precious internal debate on whether to podcast it when there are significant deficiencies.


The spoken intro sets the scene and that does work.  If it goes too long then likely it's not too much.

It talks of Gabriel on the side of the building and then you hear his horn.  That part had coolness as well.

Driving out of town to escape whatever happens down there, you see all the green bubbles and then you hear piano from somewhere.  The piano bit got all precious about being recorded so that goes to the suck winds category.

Coming out of the piano bit into the primary part of the song ... I completely screwed.  I've been setting this up all day and I still fucked it up.  The song started on the wrong phrase in the looper and I tried to sing my way out of the mistake but that was clumsy.  Then I made another mistake trying to get back to the second phrase by going through the third one.

Everything syncs back when I get to the main phrase and the vocal sounded fairly good and even right for the song.  That part had fairly good coolness and there's still an outstanding question of whether to lower the mike to force myself to scream it more.  That's likely Dry Run No. 2 to find out.

(Ed:  use the push-it-until-it-explodes rule)

Roger that, matey.  Next dry run.


Yevette said the guitar bit was gorgeous and she doesn't play to should I or should I not upload that because it wasn't even implied.  After that I told her I had been leaning toward letting any upload slide.  She suggested send it to Cat but scratch the upload.  The biggest reason is the dry run may kill the surprise on uploading the video to follow so no-one would watch it.

I like her reasoning so that's the plan.


The guitar part was sent to GarageBand for fiddling and twiddling and that was due to a longstanding problem in which the recorded version has a shrillness in the sound of the guitar which I did not perceive in playing.  One possible explanation is I'm hearing it through the PA speakers and they will inevitably color the sound.  The audio capture is directly off the mixer so it's unaffected by any speaker coloration.  The way to get it air-tight is to mike the speakers but that gets into one holy bitch of recording, proper mike placement, and blah de damn blah.  It's not technically beyond the capability of the kit here because there are plenty of mikes and cables but it would be one prime time pain in the ass and two more boom mike stands to position the mikes would add in such a delightful way to an already dangerous room.

The mikes on the speakers could run to an ultra-cheap and mostly broken but still generally functional mini-mixer and that would go to the computer for recording so the signal would not be colored by any mixer effects and should be as close as possible to how I hear it.

The damn wheels are turning and now it will be impossible to stop without trying it.


Yahoo!  Accomplishment.


So this now adjourns until Dry Run No. 2.

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