The last music posts that were rough recordings of My Favorite Subject by Off Every Day is something new I am trying out, largely as a motivator I must confess, but should prove to be interesting.
Before I forget I did want to point out one of the most incredibly consistent observations I’ve made about musicians and how the public relates to them. Any aspiring musician is the subject of criticism from virtually anyone. The interesting thing here is that the general public will not criticize, in general, a published artist or more importantly a well known artist. What would have been “you should do this and you should do that” becomes “not my bag, but I respect what they are doing”. Not everyone is like this, least of all me and my favorite subject, I’ll relentlessly criticize anything, music most of all. I am not an aspiring musician, I am one.
Back to the topic though.
What I am doing here, is to publish, after each session hopefully, a rough mix of that night’s work.
These first two are actually writing sessions, where I play the song over and over experimenting with lyrics and melodies. Since they are solo performances they take on certain characteristics that will be nothing like the finished product. Of course I will publish solo versions of everything as well, but the interesting thing here should be for all the OED fans to see the evolution first hand. Probably stupid to do in that one gets to see all the weak performances as well but fun nevertheless.
The goal of phase one is what I call a pilot track. Normally I wouldn’t do this, I would repeat until I had the final arrangement, write the drums, record the drums and go from there. Problem being that you can’t drum to a guitar track after the fact and since I never used a click track or metronome I always laid down the drums first. But now. . . I am using a metronome in Acid Pro 6.0 so I can do the opposite. Giving it a go anyway.
Pilot track in the works.
Wellp. After updating to Acid Pro 6.0d because of repeated exception errors I blew my time, which is an illusion. So I whipped out Vegas 7.0 mistakenly referred to as 6.0 and laid what I hope to be the final arrangement in a decent performance.
One of the things that will become evident to fans is that these performances are not in fact performances in the sense that a live performance would be. You mix it up when playing solo to help kill the repetition doldrums. But a pilot track, that can be really boring. If you want to try out harmonies and such the melody has to be exacting, no mixing up. This is unfortunately more like a live performance. Anyway. Probably the last pilot post.
[audio:2007_06_28_My_Favorite_Subject.mp3]
I hear the Monterey OED Festival was shut down due to excessive drugs and nudity. Bummer. A lot of great musicians got their first real exposure (so to speak) there.
As far as this process – I think it’s great fun! It’s not just grass roots, it’s grass roots, with weeds. It puts you naked out there to the public. Wait a minute! Weed and nudity – no wonder you keep getting shut down!
I know you perspiring musicians probably do not enjoy “this reminds me of” comparisons, but parts of the guitar work remind me of Nick Drake. Cool.
It’s especially hard to take when one is naked.