Building Fences (updated)
This isn’t game-related at all, but I might as well put it somewhere!
For many years, I have been writing and recording songs for no real purpose other than my own recreation. It’s always been out of my own apartment, which means it’s a fairly lo-fi, amateur endeavor. This is fine, except that it precludes drums, which I can’t keep in my apartment because neighbors apparently just don’t have the ear to appreciate them.
Anyway, today I was able to go over to a buddy’s apartment and lay down some drum tracks for a few songs (his neighbors must be more enlightened than mine). It’s the first time I’ve actually committed drums to a recording of mine, and I think it could have turned out better, but it’s just nice to finally have been able to actually get all the intended parts in there for once.
On this track, in all, I play acoustic guitar, piano, drums, and keyboard, along with vocals. Everything except the drums was recorded over a year ago as I recall (without a metronome, which made today an exasperating exercise).
Update: I have added some vocal harmony here and there, and adjusted some slight timing issues with the drum track.
Tags: drums, hooray, not video games, songs
May 18th, 2008 at 12:03 am
holy shit chris, this sounds really great! I was recording with drum tracks recently too, and getting used to playing with a metronome took a while for me to get used to too. but keep up the good work, i can’t wait to hear more
May 18th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Thanks! What I meant though is that the original recording (sans drums) was made without a metronome, so it wasn’t really perfectly in tempo–it’s weird to play drums against something like that, rather than behind something, if you know what I mean.
May 18th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Hey Chris, I emailed you some music of mine a few months ago just to see what you thought after one of your music postings, but I never heard anything. Should I assume you didn’t ever get it, or interpret your silence as cold hard rejection?
May 21st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Heya — sounds good! How did you process all the different recording tracks (what software) and how much post-processing (mixing) did you do (apart from what you wrote in the update)?
As a learning sound engineer I’m curious about others work.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:13 am
Amlash:
How big were the files? They may not have gotten to my inbox.
Firefreak:
Thanks! I used Acid Pro 6.0 to record everything; I’ve been using Acid for about eight years now, and I still know hardly anything about recording or mixing, haha. I basically just treat it as a multi-track recorder: plug in the mic, record the track.
The only real mixing was adjusting track volumes. I added some reverb in post here and there and did some eq’ing on the drums because I didn’t set the mics up very well. Honestly my production skills are nonexistent. I wish I knew more!
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Chris, It was an 11 MB zip file, probably 6 songs? I sent it on March 6th.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
The lyrics and music go really well together. Good stuff.
Are you ever going to accept my challenge for a Pikmin 2 duel you cowardly hippy?
May 29th, 2008 at 9:52 am
There is an application that will allow you to use the drums from Rock Band as a drum machine on any Windows PC.
http://andrewrudson.com/drummachine/main.php
It doesn’t give you the full versatility of a drum kit, but it’s nice for making demos and whatnot.
June 9th, 2008 at 1:59 am
So when do we get more recordings? How is music overall going? I’ve had Building Fences stuck in my head all week and i end up catching myself sing it all the time haha.