Welcome. 510 Music Log is an offshoot of the 510 Musician Collaborative, a Meetup group I started in December this past year. Spearheading this group, more than anything, kick started me back into music in high gear.
This log is going to be the clearinghouse of my notes to
myself (and to anyone who wants to read them) about songwriting, recording,
mixing, producing, performing, etc. Anything, in short, that I can think of to
do with music. This comes out of a practical need, and a large dose of
enthusiasm.
I have been playing guitar for 32 years or so, and though I
am still somewhat of an amateur, I persist. Over the years have probably
written 50 to 75 songs. Of that batch, I have recorded at least half of them. That
may not seem much over 32 years, but most of the songwriting occurred over roughly
three year periods (mid-nineties; 2002-2005; and 2020-until now). At some point
I will post the story of this journey, but it will suffice to say that in the
last couple of years I rediscovered my love of music. I write a Substack, Collected
Uncollected which deals mainly with writing and reading and my passion
around that. You can read on there a post about my re-immersion into
songwriting. Music has been a great salve in the tumultuous era of the pandemic,
something always under my nose that I didn’t always have the gumption to pursue.
The practical need part is that twenty years ago, I did a
lot of recording of my songs on a Tascam digital recorder and had no idea what
I was doing. However, I am duly impressed with some of the recordings now, for
the quality of the songwriting, and for the production, as limited as I was in
that area. I now wish I had a clue what I was doing right then. Some of those
recordings though were also a mess, in terms of clipping and general distortion,
among other things. But in some cases, I could and should have documented more
thoroughly how I made them. I guess I thought at the time they were one offs,
or that I was so deep into it that maybe I’d never forget how I did it. Well,
twenty years have gone by and I am now so ill-equipped production-wise that I
cannot reconstruct how I did those songs and recordings. My idea is to document
the hell out of this stuff, just for my own sense of well-being, and musical
edification.
Some insights from recording the melancholy muses
I recently messed around with fleshing out a basic track I had put down with my electric guitar. I called this recording, not quite a song (yet), “the melancholy muses”, listen to it here. This was the first thing I created on my new (old) Fender Tele. This was a structure I came up with trying to achieve that ambient sound I’ve found in the work of the always inspiring New Zealander, Roy Montgomery, and this album in particular, 324 E. 13th Street #7, in fact, I think I somehow swiped that title from him, or from Giorgio DeChirico, go figure.
First, I messed around figuring out a bass line
on the E and A strings at the 15th and 17th frets, which
to me sounds like the Cure, an eminently good thing—how I came up with that?
Purely by ear. Then, I did a solo track on the B and E (higher strings, the
last two on the fretboard) at 3rd, 5th, and 7th
frets, also by ear. This was trying to follow what I was doing on the rhythm
track.
In terms of the recording, I pushed the reverb to the 3/4
turn on my Katana (amp), if not to full, as I’ve been under the impression (before
watching the terrific documentary series, “Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson”)
that it was delay and sampling that I was going after, when in fact it was
reverb. Now I’m not entirely sure what effects I am looking for, though reverb
is my friend.
In terms of the mic: I had it set at 1/4, maybe ten inches
from the amp; even with it loud-ish (1/4 turn on the amp volume, which is loud
to my aging ears) I was able to get good recordings. Latency, a problem that
has bedeviled me ever since I started diving back into recording (two years or
so ago), was not a huge problem once I ran the latency fix on Bandlab. I
now wonder if I might try Cakewalk again.
My solution to latency in general has been to call out “1,
2, 3, 4,” prior to recording a track; then, when I add another track, I call
out the sequence and can relatively easily align the call outs on the
recording. After I ran the latency fix, I found the calling out was already
aligning, for which I was overjoyed, because then I could get on with the tinkering.
In terms of reverb in general, I found when I did the cover of the Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions song, “Around My Smile”, reverb just lifted it into the range I was hoping for. As well, the secondary track I recorded came out sounding a bit like a viola, for which I was pleased. I’m sure I will eventually re-record this to make it better. Here’s the mostly finished track (unless I take it off to re-record it).
Open mic miscellania
As for preparing to perform at the next open mic: I recognize I have a habit, a desire, to use the capo on certain songs, usually on the second fret. In particular, I have always assumed “The Way Back” needed the capo on the second fret, but after hearing the dreadful recording of my singing it at my very first open mic (a recording which I swear will remain unpublished by me!), I noticed I push my voice in an unpleasant way on the chorus; I’m going to attempt to not do that song with the capo on the second fret again, at least “live.” I’m not sure I totally understand why I want to sing in that range. Some of the problem I think, for that song, is that the chorus can begin to sound a bit monotonous. Do I just rewrite the chorus to something more singable? Maybe.
