Last updated 2 weeks ago?!
Oh no!! I wrote a thing a couple days ago and never posted it so let's do a new one instead!
I spent all of the Thanksgiving week working on a bass part for Austin, took a while but sounded good in the end! Wore my fingers down though, but by now I'm back to normal. The other thing that's been distracting me from The Ablum is this Christmas compilation I'm contributing to, which, I think I bit off more than I can chew.
Or, well, I picked a song that is already pretty dense, and is in a language I am not going to try to sing in, so I'm reverse-engineering an English translation from other languages closer to English that it has been translated into. This is not extremely easy. The original Japanese has several English words peppered in, which I intend to keep in place, so it's like a weird syntactic puzzle to work backwards from those; the song was also translated into German (no longer about winter time though) and Galician of all things, but it's hard to find a recording of that, so I just have the transcribed lyrics with no reference of the rhythm at which those syllables come out. There are two fan rewrites I've found - one translated into Hebrew, and one actually-wintertime rewrite in German, but neither of those is especially helpful. Eventually I decided I had wasted enough time and needed to start recording.
So I went in and did drums. They sound good! I intend to do arco bass, but I am bad at it, and also it's cold now and I'd prefer not to walk an hour in the cold - I might do some bass here instead. The last couple days I've been recording guitars and accordions; I initially wanted like a driving electronic four on the floor kaleidoscoping arpeggio chorus, but, I don't know why I moved away from that. Bass clarinet and saxophone probably, plus glockenspiel and maybe hammered dulcimer. Well, I'm going to go into my space to do sax and vocals anyway, maybe I will do real bass.
I should probably return the (rented) bass to the shop but I haven't been in Manhattan since March and kind of don't want to have to go there until the virus is quieter, but also... it seems like less of a hassle to just keep renting it than to bring it back and have to rent it again whenever I need to record bass again. Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It's cheap, but I feel stupid. It feels irresponsible.
Regarding the actual album I'm supposed to be finishing and talking about here, I know that in the past week or so I was mixing Three Word Phrase - oh, that's what it was, when I recorded drums for this thing, I spent like an hour trying every mic I have access to on the upright bass, in different positions, pizzicato, and... I don't know if it's my playing chops, or my mics, or my preamp, or the bass itself, but it's always so thuddy. I can't reliably get that crisp Jim Creeggan tone. (There's an egg in his name.)
Kyle played some stylophone for Compound Eye too! That was a fun surprise. It sounds good, I think, but the overall mix will have to be tw-
the high E string on my electric guitar just popped. It's like two feet away from me, I was playing it earlier but like an hour ago. No idea how that happened.
Oh MAN this is the bare minimum I'm doing, huh?? I got distracted by the song, I wrote this like 5 hours ago. I did record electric upright bass, it sounds good, my intonation is getting better with all this practice, still bad at bowing though. Wrote the other half of the solo, for clarinet, will record during daylight hours tomorrow so as to not get evicted. Yes it does little trills in reference to that the original solo was played on like a harspichord patch but I was absolutely thinking of the theme song Amy X Neuburg wrote for Piki & Poko. Ahhh it's already midnight and I have work in the morning