X-Ray Dentures
By Cosmic Cairns on February 27, 2018 11:02 pm
As a sort of counterbalance to the over-tweaking I did a couple weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to embrace some imperfection. I started with a simple bass and drum beat. The intention was to do a one take guitar improv over the top, but I didn't quite succeed in this. Through lapses in concentration/messing up too hard I ended up stopping twice. But I picked back up immediately from where I left off so the result is three back to back guitar improvs that were each done in one take and hopefully blend into one guitar jam. All mistakes and bad notes were left intact.
After that I wanted to flesh out the overall sound a little bit so I started to just pile on some sounds including a little more guitar, some synths, ocarina, tin whistle, and the clacking sound of my own teeth. By happy accident, my old friend Bobby Bergland called me right when I was in the middle of recording. We don't live in the same city anymore and it had been a little while since I had spoken to him so it was a strange coincidence he decided to call when he did. Bobby has an amazing singing voice. I had him sing on a couple tracks back in 2016 when he was passing through town for work and he collaborates sometimes with fellow WeeklyBeater cfurrow. This particular track I was working on didn't seem to really call for angelic vocals though, and he couldn't really hear the song anyway. He does have a delightfully quirky sense of humor and enjoys talking though. So what I did was put the phone on speaker, held it up to the microphone, and asked him to monologue about whatever he felt like. He ended up telling a silly story about pickling corn along with some other strangeness. While I could understand what he was saying when I isolated his track, it became a bit unintelligable in the context of the whole mix. But I liked it as a pure sound element, so I doubled down by putting some delay on it and interweaving it on itself on a few tracks.
Finally in the spirit of embracing imperfection I only allowed myself one re-mix after my first mix-down. No overthinking, no driving myself nuts tweaking, just one adjustment and then it is what it is.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)
Enjoyed the rough edges... took me back to recording stuff direct onto tape... nice one