I spent most of yesterday cleaning the drums of 2 Defrost Nixon tracks, mainly the tom tracks. Our drummer wasn't the most experienced at the time, and coupled with the not so great recording in a basement, the cymbals leaked and bled into every single microphone on the drum set. This creates quite a mess when trying to mix it and, say, raise the kick and snare without raising the cymbals which are already too loud in the mix. I'm sure you get the idea. The solution is attempting a lot of cleanup, tricks, etc., desperately trying to get the drums to sound decent and well rounded.
Cleaning the toms isn't too difficult but incredibly tedious. It takes me usually about 1-2 hours to do a song and it's basically endless clicking, separating, fading, and repeat over and over and over. You get a bit looney after awhile and therefore need to take breaks in between songs. I'm not sure what I like less...cleaning tom tracks or working on manipulating MIDI. They're both quite awful to work on, in my opinion.
Once the tom tracks were cleaned, I then began working on trying to replace the kick and snare tracks using Steven Slate's Trigger 2 software. As usual, it didn't go well and I had to spend an hour or more doing research online in order to get some hints and pointers. Everyone raves about the Trigger 2 software but I personally can't stand it. I'm either doing something terribly wrong or it just doesn't work well for the purpose that I'm throwing at it. I'm going to start over today and see if I can try a few different tricks that I read about and/or came up with in my own head. I guess you never know what'll work.
In the evening, I just happened to look at the used section of GuitarCenter.com and found a white with black trim Rickenbacker 360 that's supposedly in "excellent" condition. I've been searching for one of these for the past 7 years and so I quickly grabbed my GC credit card and hit purchase. They only made these basically from around 1987 - 1998, I believe, and at the time everyone pretty much despised them since they don't look like the normal Ric's. Of course, today, they're fairly prized because they're unique but finding one that someone didn't more or less do the Pete Townsend on is rather difficult. I guess we'll see what actual condition it's in when it shows up. The beauty of Guitar Center online purchases is that they're incredibly easy to return to a store so there's fairly low risk.
I think I failed to mention that the Spirit Awards are also in full swing. I got the email last week with the screeners and so I've already been making my way through the list, mainly in the evenings. I started "Everything Everywhere All at Once" last night. I mean, what the hell?! Wow, that is some trip of a movie so far (I'm only about half way through). It makes you think that someone spiked your drink without knowing it.
Today will be about more drums and such. I have 5 more tracks on the Defrost Nixon album where I need to clean the toms so I'll probably work on one a day, just to spread out the work. I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the overall sound of "The Worst Salesman Ever", "Humor for a Lexophile", and then my personal favorite track "Semaphore on All Fours". I think all the songs will need some minor re-recording and additions but they're not that bad in their original current form. On the plus side, it's amazing how much better of a guitar sound I can record today vs. 12 years ago, but on the downside it always leaves you questioning whether you should actually waste the time doing it since it tends to completely change the overall sound of the track. It'll be interesting to see what this project ends up sounding like in the end.
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