Well. It's
finally done. More than a year ago, I ran into an intriguing spam alt-
text that reminded me, more than a little, of early R.E.M. lyrics. I
decided to work with them and turn them into early R.E.M.-like lyrics
(original version here). At that time, I
said something like, now all I have to do is write an early R.E.M.
song to go with the lyrics. Around the same time, I'd bought a
keyboard, with the idea that I'd get my playing skills back up and
possibly record some things. A bit of an uphill battle, since I'd
never recorded anything, really. The music was almost completely
assembled in my head before I got some of the necessary equipment (a
USB/audio MIDI interface, a decent mic), and then I had to learn how
to use the damned things. (Gigantic, enormous thanks to Roger Winston
for advice here, and to Bradley Skaught and glenn mcdonald for advice
they didn't necessarily know they were offering - they bear none of
the blame for how this turned out, though.)
The lyrics, almost from the moment I started
assembling and writing them, had a clear focus that I didn't want to
overclarify (as I said back then, at the link above, that would turn
them from early R.E.M. lyrics to later R.E.M. lyrics). All I'll say on
that is, they're about the events of the last four and a half years
(with one historical reference to a related event about fourteen years
ago), and I'm not happy at all about those events.
My main musical challenge was that I'd never really thought much
about how drums work before, so I spent a lot of time listening to
drum tracks (early Bill Berry most prominently), watching drummers,
and trying to figure out how to make a drum part sound more or less
organic (i.e., playable by a single human with the standard complement
of limbs).
I also needed to upgrade my computer (something I'd wanted to do
anyway) - only to discover that, no, I couldn't hook it up directly to
the keyboard (I told you, I didn't know the first thing about MIDI)
and record noise (thus the need for the Tascam US-122). I ended up
cheating a bit: rather than composing, arranging, and editing a bunch
of MIDI parts together - which was more MIDI than I felt I could deal
with at once, including the notion that I'd inadvertently delete
months of work - as soon as individual tracks were done, I recorded
them as .wav files and (being more familiar with how to edit those)
arranged and edited those. On the one hand, this might have given a
slightly more "human"-sounding, slightly less perfect feel to the
whole thing (even though the basic rhythm tracks are locked into a
beat - except for one part of the song that I slowed down slightly) -
on the other, I'm sure that it probably caused me more grief in the
end...not least when I did in fact lose months of work, by somehow
both deleting a bunch of files on the computer and losing the backup
disc I'd burned. (This was, probably not coincidentally, after my
first attempt to record the vocal tracks: I think I must have
narcoleptically turned into a self-sabotaging evil twin.) Fortunately,
I'd at that point mixed down a complete instrumental track - so even
though I was hampered in being unable to alter that mix, I didn't have
to start from scratch.
So, here's my imitation early R.E.M. song (although oddly, it was
apparently done on a day when all the guitars were locked in a room
that everyone was too drunk to remember where the keys were). Pretend
you're hearing real instruments.
Also, I am sorry the singing sounds like ass.
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