In other news, you may have noticed that I've been quiet for a few weeks. Something personal occurred, and I try to make it a point not to share overly personal details online. Needless to say, it was a trying and depressing 2-3 weeks but things are starting to calm down again.
I had been in the middle of re-recordings and mixes but I'll be damned if I remember what the heck I was doing. It'll probably take me a week or two just to get my head around everything again, plus I haven't really picked up a guitar in all that time either. Meanwhile, my pinky finger issues have gotten significantly worse and it's starting to get alarming.
In other news, I did have a meeting with MWP (Marty) about 3 weeks ago. It was a good talk but slightly contentious, mainly because I apparently misunderstood what he was looking for with the tracks that I was prepping for him. He always talks about "demos" and the lightbulb finally clicked for me this time. You see, back in the day, bands often would record entire albums as "demos" first, give them to producers and the record companies, etc., and then they'd go record the actual album that we all know and love. He kept calling my actual recordings "demos" and it was slightly irking, to be honest, but now I get it. And so, with the "Yet I Tried for You" EP that we're more than likely going to do together perhaps this year, I'm going to use his approach, basically recording a demo version of the 4 tracks first and then we'll record the real deal in a studio. It's honestly not my normal approach, and I instead usually follow the approach that I learned from Seth Tiven where you lay down "scratch" tracks first, flesh out the format, and then record "real" parts over the scratch tracks. This ends up being the real album and you basically work from your original sessions, although you basically re-record the main parts. It's a different way of thinking but I think I'll just go with it and see where it gets me.
This whole demo thing is kind of strange, though. Why record in a studio? Well, I'm asking myself that as well. I guess I'm just curious to have that experience, and also I want to know how much better a project will come out in the end. I'll more than likely never do it again just based on the proposed cost (astronomical, to be frank) but I'm sort of dying to know how much better/different a professional product of mine would sound. In many ways, though, it goes against my core belief that we should be getting more great music from all over the world due to the home studio revolution...and yet somehow we're not, and music has simply tanked instead. It's all so very odd. I guess we'll see.