I went up into the studio with the intentions of finishing the Fool Play demo this weekend. I had to fight off a kitten named Obie from playing with all the cords (another reason to consider wireless).
Obie solo with the wrong cords.
I attacked using a drum beat on my keyboard while singing along to get the approximate length of the song. Then I practiced the bass part a few times and recorded. Nowhere near perfect, but ok for my personal demo IMHO. Then I sang over that with similar results. Somewhere along the way one of the verses became a bridge and I worked in a rudimentary organ part – all before breakfast!
Used the FocusRite compressor and reverb on the vocals with the settings below. Just trial and error at this point – no idea what I’m doing there (with any of it?).
A good weekend for music productivity. Got some bass practice in on Saturday morning and read some of the March issue of Recording and got back to Fool Play on Sunday morning.
March’s segment of Recording’s First Steps series focused on selection of studio monitors. I’m beginning to lean towards just sticking with my stereo speakers at least while I’m making the demos of the songs. I really want to limit my spending at this point. I recently discovered that the “lite” version of the Ableton Live DAW software only allows 8 tracks, which I bumped up against when I was trying out some background vocals. Again, this will probably suffice for demos as I can mix down tracks if necessary.
One minor acquisition I must make is another instrument cable. As I have only been plugging my bass into my amp for quite a long time, but when I thought of putting a mic on my bass amp and playing along to the metronome on my keyboard, I realized I was a chord short (some people realized that about me long ago).
Here is a snippet of what I did manage to get down to “tape.” (I ended strumming acoustic guitar to the metronome and then playing bass to that.)
I think the vocals are starting to take shape (especially the second verse). I am struggling a bit with trying to fit in “Stop Your Quiet” before “Fool Play” in the chorus and am thinking of just leaving it out. Listening to it again, I realize I’ll need to practice a lot and I’m hearing a little Cat Stevens in it.
With Get-Up guitarist/singer/songwriter Bill O’Driscoll in town last weekend, the music, and craft beer, was flowing. Eddie played bass, and sang, while Bill was the guitar, and harmonica, man and also sang. We shored up some of the newer Get-Up tracks and solidified the standards. Much of the session was recorded by Renee Rosensteel (http://rosensteel.com/) – photographer, videographer and all-around intriguing person (Bill and I will determine if any of that audio is shareable).
Celebrating 50 years of existence.
So, this weekend is the time for me to make some progress on the solo project. Even though I have a lot of work remaining on the Fool Play demo, another track was playing in my head as I was lying awake in bed early this morning. Perhaps it is the fact that there has been a fair amount of Twitter activity regarding this year’s Philadelphia Folk Festival. I figured out the chords and hammered out an initial sketch of “Regular Folk” with which I’m pretty happy. Here ya go:
