Day 2 was actually highly productive since I laid down 3 new songs for the "Beautiful Silence" album. It takes about 2-3 hours per song, and that just means setting up the session in ProTools, finding the right tempo, getting the mic levels set, and then only recording the base acoustic track (usually 3-4 times) with a scratch vocal as a guide. Doing the composition track, where you compile all the best parts into one track, takes about 30 minutes to complete. If you're doing the math and following along, you can probably imagine how many hours go into a completed song since I'm only talking right now about the bare minimum.
These three tracks are pretty important to the album, especially "Can't Let It Go", one of my fav's of the new material. It's a fairly simple song and there won't be much going on so getting the base acoustic part correct was highly important, both in sound and playability. I was quite shocked to see that the track clocked in at just under 7 minutes in length! And, here I thought it was one of the shorter songs on the album. Go figure. My playing so far has been pretty impressive and I've finally turned the corner of being album to play much quieter, more expressive, and so on. I'm liking it.
I also worked on a song called "About the Time I Met You" which is one of my first real takes at trying to do something very early Floyd-ish ala the "Meddle" album. The guitar part is so simple that I didn't know if I wanted to pursue the song at first but there's just something nice and pleasant about it. I'm not sure it'll end up on the album since it's kind of in the wings but it's there if needed. Either way, it'll be released at some point.
The last track I worked on has no name and I've simply been calling it "REM-ish Tune", meaning R.E.M. of the "Around the Sun" or "Automatic for the People" sort of sound. I think I'm the only person in the entire world that likes "Around the Sun" and even the band has apparent distaste for it. I'm not sure why because I think it's fairly wonderful except for a few small bits here and there. Anyhow, my song just has some sort of feel to it that reminds me of those albums but I still have no idea what the song will end up being about. Sometimes, it just remains a mystery until the end.
I finished the recording session at 11:40pm, believe it or not. I got a late start so I simply decided to pound away into the evening, trying to stay on track. It's also quieter in the neighborhood in the evening so I sometimes prefer recording with open mic's at that time. I'd like to get as much of this album blueprinted as possible this week, especially since I have countless other things to work on.
My day ended with starting the screener "Fresh" that I requested a couple of weeks ago. It started quite fun and light and turned very dark and disturbing quickly but I think I overall like it so far. I also will admit that I like getting screeners and such from studios, and at least posing like I'm someone to be reckoned with in the film industry (even though I'm obviously not). It's amazing what a hundred dollars membership a year will buy you.
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