Thursday, September 8, 2022

Back to the "Old"

It's an interesting activity to do, going over your old half done recordings and such.  I always play this guessing game where I try desperately to remember approximately what year I started a recording and which iteration of gear it was done on.  Some of these tracks have been transferred from system to system a couple of times. Due to my memory not being what it was, I usually can't really pinpoint the origination of a particular track anymore.

I will say this...  It's about 100x easier to record electronic music versus mic'ing guitar cabinets and such.  I mean, it's night and day.  I spent a good couple of hours this week going over my electronic based "album" and/or fake band name "The Caution Children" material and was shocked by how good the quality is.  Why?  Well, it's all simply a keyboard plugged directly into a recording device.  Even with it being transferred over multiple times from system to system, it really does hold quite well.  If I was to listen to an old guitar based recording, which I often do, mind you, I usually cry slightly into my drink and write down in my notes something like "re-record all the guitars for they sound beyond belief awful."  What's the moral to the story?  Electronic music is fairly simple to put together in comparison.

Now, having said that, I must say that there's a fun to electronic based music that you just don't get in guitar based work.  I view the two different styles in completely separate veins, and things that I get from guitar based work I don't really get it from crafting electronic based tracks, and vice versa.  They more or less fill two different holes within me.  I think the quiet decision to finally reopen the vault on the Caution Children album is perhaps a good one since it seems to warrant some immediate rewards, especially since it does in fact cater to a completely different part of me.  It also kick starts me back into actually putting music together again versus just mixing and other technical BS.

Getting back to the actual tracks that I listened to, I was amazed by how little seems to fall into the "re-record" category, even vocal-wise.  Now, having said that, most of these tracks are not complete by any means but the core of the song is there so I can make a fairly good judgement on it.  I only have half an album right now, though, with two more songs that I originally wrote back in the dark ages that may or may not actually see the light of day.  I simply need to play around with them and see how I feel today.  I did come up with the basis for a brand new song just last week so I probably now have 6 out of 10 total.  Oh, and did I mention that I wrote the original group of songs for this back in 1993-94?  Yes, no joke.  That's how old we're talking on this one.

A bit to my surprise, it's now September and time that I have a serious talk with myself since the year is slowly slipping away.  What do I want to get accomplished before the year ends?  Well, the "Mirror Land" EP needs to be released, no debating that one.  I'm also working daily right now on the "Lost Weekend" remixes which are coming along but have a ways to go.  I'm still arguing over how much I should consider actually rerecording on that one, that's a bit of an internal struggle for me, to be honest.  I have a feeling I'm going to lean towards the rerecording of certain tracks but it probably depends how they sound overall after I tinker with them.

And so, I still anticipate the EP coming out, hopefully fairly soon, and then the "Lost Weekend" remix before the end of the year.  Can anything else get done?  I think I can make some decent headway on the Caution Children album but then there's the "Wrecking Ball" album which also should get completed really no later than within the next 6-8 months.  And, let's not forget "Defrost Nixon" and the new Jazz Machine.  Like I said, I have some decisions to make clearly for I'll be lucky if only one of these can also get squeezed in.

That's my rambling for this morning.  I'll be posting about my adventures in speaker and monitor land over the next few days.  That's been a trip unto itself.

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