Fly Away On My Zephyr

Seeing friends smiling, happy and healthy on facebook, people that I used to be quite close to, in some cases very close, makes me smile. It makes me nostalgic, and it makes me feel very sad & far away. From them. From my goals. From reality. But it makes me happy to see them enjoying life. I’m enjoying life, I could just do a bit more with myself though. Gonna go sit on my bedroom window ledge and stare at the sky for a bit longer, like I used to.

Day 2 of working on this cover of TV on the Radio’s,
“Love Dog”. It’s pretty much 11pm, and I’ve worked on this since 8am, same as yesterday. Tomorrow it’ll be the third day………………..

I’ve fucked it up in so many times, in such small ways. One of the most frustrating things is how I went around recording everything the completely wrong way. Like I recorded the bass first, then tried for ages to get vocals. Then did average guitar. Then added a bunch of other stuff. Tried, prior to guitar and vocals, to lay down a drum track using my little midi keyboard. So stupid… I should have done that first! What was I thinking?! It’s made it so much more difficult to work with everything. Plus Pro Tools SE is being its usual buggy self………..

Well at least I learned that next time I do something this complex, lay down the beat first. Blank canvas: add the beat. The rest will follow.

It may suck a bit, yet the sound of it is growing on me. I still strongly dislike my voice and wish I was a better singer, but hey, I’m only gonna improve by practicing.

Things I like about the cover so far:

• I’ve decided to film all of the different instruments (pretty much just me singing, guitar, and bass) from different angles & at different times of the day to get different types of light. Then I’ll edit it all together to the final audio mix and make (hopefully) more interesting cover video than what I usually do, where the camera’s just static for the whole time.
• The bass is pretty good - I originally had something that was more funky/all over the place in the style of Flea, but decided to tone it down because this song isn’t in that style and the bass line didn’t fit.
• Dual vocals (high & low). They’re nowhere near perfect, and don’t even match up completely, but the lower is louder than the higher vocal track, which makes it easier/nicer to listen to. It’s a very hard song for me to sing, though. But I wanted a challenge, I guess
• Keyboard track done via new Nanokey2. first time using a usb keyboard,or keyboard of any kind for this kind of work, so it’s been interesting to work with it. There are some truly terrible loops and sounds that they’ve included though… like the stock standard sounds. God damn….

Um anyway, hopefully I’ll get the drum track done tomorrow, then I can begin the video editing part, and then maybe if I make something half decent i’ll post it. Otherwise I’ve just kinda wasted like two days.

G’Night!

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a perfectionist. Or that I was better at things so I wouldn’t need to spend a long time on them getting them to my own high standards… But that’s how you get better I guess, by practising.

Wish I had enough money for vocal lessons…

Finally worked out how to play that fast initial hammer on section from “Don’t Forget Me”. I feel so stupid for not realising this sooner…

If you add a delay, then it echoes, so instead of trying to do the hammer-on’s with insane and what is probably considered inhuman speed, you can do it at a “slower” pace, and get the full effect. And use two hands to do the hammer-on’s from 5-8-0 on the first string, because god dammit I cannot for the life of me use one hand to it at the speed that the Froosh does without using delay… I think he uses delay too, smart guy. <3