Them "Fuses..."

 I'm happy to report that I've been relatively productive thus far this weekend.  I have a long list of small tasks to accomplish on the "jazz machine" recording and I'm simply making my way down the list little by little.  The list entails tasks such as trying out small guitar parts, keyboard bits, momentary effects, drum beats, and so on.

One of the tasks was to record a sound sample from a film for a small bridge segment in the track "(He Was) Some Kind of a Man".  This is the only song on this album that has film samples on it, and it both begins and ends with one.  I knew I wanted to add something during a short break around the bridge section and I'd been putting it off since I wasn't exactly sure what sample I would actually want to use.

So, here's a great example how recording can become a whole different art form.  The first thing I did was grab the DVD of "Touch of Evil", plug in some speakers to my laptop, and then fast forward the film to the portion where Dennis Weaver is the Mirador Motel Night Manager.  Now, the first time I saw this film, these scenes completely boggled my mind for they are so completely outrageous that you simply don't know what the hell to make of them the first time 'round.  Then, after seeing the film a few times, these scenes quickly became for me the most classic comedic film scenes, all while not necessarily trying to be funny.  If you've seen the film, I think you know what I mean.

I narrowed the segments that I intended to use down to one short segment with Janet Leigh talking through the wall to some unknown person and then one rather long part that lasted nearly 8 minutes between Heston and Weaver.  I chose this latter one because it had some great lines from Weaver but also didn't have any background music in it, which I was saddened to see that most of Weaver's lines did have some supposed motel music going on in the background which would have been rather distracting, I think, hence I avoided those.  Next, I put my AT 4050 next to my computer speakers, pressed play and record, and simply recorded the whole segment into Pro Tools without having a clue of what I would use.  Then, I literally spent over 2 hours filtering through the dialog.  I basically cut the segments up in multiple ways, moved them around, pasted them together, and so on, and in the end created a simple Weaver/Leigh short no more than 10 second conversation for the bridge.  Yes, that's right - over 2 hours worth of work for merely 10 seconds of audio.  And, that's recording for ya, folks.  I will say, though, that every time I hear it, it simply makes me laugh out loud so hopefully it's worth it.

I also received the Breedlove C25.  The action is not what I was expecting so I'm a bit disappointed initially.  The guitar looks stunning but the top is rather dark, sometimes suggesting that it's been dried out (which is bad), and so I'm not sure what my intentions are with it as of yet.  I need to restring it and such and see what I think.  I have a feeling I'll be taking it in for a complete setup before I really know what state its in.  One never knows what they're getting when buying used acoustics.