As We Stumble Along

Started recording parts and the only thing keeping from despair at how poorly it is going is the realization of just how much I'm trying to do for the first time.

I've recorded parts into MIDI before. I've almost never tried to record instrumental performances of my own. Certainly not to a click track. So this is basically the first time I'm playing along with someone else (even if the "someone else" is the previously recorded tracks).

And not all the tone colors work. I mixed sound for live bands for a few years but this is the first time in which I am having to make the overall musical decisions. It isn't just the placement of the microphone, but how hard to pluck, how far sul tasto to place the bow, where to place the tone hand on the bodhran. It isn't that easy to hear, not while also playing the parts in.

But the biggest disappointment is how ragged I am. How obviously uncomfortable, how much I struggle just to get through the instrumental line without error, with little left over to bring out expression and nuance.

Of course I'm doing a multi-instrumental recording that includes instruments I've held for less than a month. So I don't have the comfort -- the chops -- to let me go on automatic and leave me free to following the beat, hitting necessary accents, adjusting tonal qualities, etc.  This is the downside to not practicing four hours a day.

(I do have that kind of practice on the recorder. Which isn't as helpful as it could be in part because of the crazy accidentals of this D, E, D#, Cm chord progression, but even more because, drat it, the recorder parts I wrote are neither idiomatic nor play to my strengths on that instrument.)

But, actually, it ain't that bad. The violin performance is particularly bad but I had pretty much zero rehearsal on it. And even the crumhorn sort of does the job, at least after a lot of EQ. (The patch I was using to simulate it in the mock-up had more of a low end presence, substituting as it is for a low synth pad in the original song).

On the technical side, crashed the Powerbook once. Chased around a terrible lag and finally solved it by turning Chrome off (it was fighting with Reaper over the audio drivers, apparently). Using some of my old mic collection through an external phantom power/pre-amp and a cheap Behringer USB interface. I really, really miss my Pro37 condenser, though. It just had a magic touch on so many instruments. The only positive comment I can make on the mics is the MK1000 kick mic does a nice job on the bodhran.

I think I'm going to move some of the recording to my workplace for a quieter and more importantly more private environment where I can take the mute off the violin and back up the mic. Close-mic is not really the right trick for some of these sounds, and I really don't need to be worrying what the neighbors think in addition to all my other performance stresses.