It's Almost Raining (...Elvis Fish, that is)

My time off is quickly coming to a close with only one more day to go.  I've been pretty busy over the past couple of days, mainly doing everything I can to get the "...Fish!" album as far along as possible.  Adding drums to tracks is always a rather tedious task, and whereas I've got a couple parts here and there still to work out, most of the drums are now complete.  It's amazing how much a drum beat, even if subtle, changes the entire sound of a song, especially one that you've had lying around for over a decade.

Today was about some acoustic guitar parts, basically to add some spice and space to a couple of tracks.  This meant putting the 12 string to work, something that I've owned now for over a decade and yet have barely had the chance to ever use.  It appeared that the strings hadn't been changed since 2013.  Um, yes, I know...embarrassing.  So, yes, the first task was changing the strings on this beast.

I'm obviously no stranger to changing guitar strings.  However, I'm still learning to navigate the world with my new poorer eyesight, and changing 12 strings on a large acoustic sounded like a rather daunting task.  Well, I was correct, and it actually took me over an hour to do.  Many people probably don't know this but Breedlove acoustics, at least the original ones (pre the sale of the company), use a bridge where the strings literally pull through it (like electrics) rather than the alternative "peg" style on most acoustics.  Breedlove always claimed that it made the guitar more resonant and I wouldn't doubt it, to be honest.  Their 6 strings are fairly easy to deal with; the 12 strings, however, double up the pairing of strings through the bridge and therefore it's really difficult to get the strings both to pull out, pull through, and then ultimately sit correctly inside the bridge.  As someone who can't see up close well at all, this proved to be quite a task, especially trying to also work with 12 tuners spaced rather close together.  This whole task ended up not being without bloodshed for I ended up poking my finger directly into one of the high strings which hurt like a son of a...

Once the strings were changed, I worked on adding my part to "Raining Twilight Coast".  At first, I could not get the part to sit correctly.  I thought maybe the track wasn't aligned to the grid in the proper fashion but after multiple tries I figured out that it was actually due to not being able to hear what I was playing well enough.  Because of this, I was always coming in just slightly late, throwing the whole part of in the song.

Once that song was complete, I moved on to some accent strums on "One Long Pair of Eyes".  I thought this song would be a nightmare because it actually has no click track at all.  Why?  I actually recorded the core 2 parts back in, um, 2003?  Yeah, it's that old, believe it or not, and I didn't realize back then that I actually needed to record a click track on all songs.  Strangely, though, adding the guitar to this song ended up taking 1/3 of the time of the previous.  Funny how that is.

Tomorrow, my last recording day, will be filled with all the other odds and ends that I've written down over the past month or so for this album.  I'm not sure if I'll get through everything but I should come close.  I have more mixing to do on these tracks but I'll try to work on it this week after my workdays end.  Also, I finally figured out the licensing issues for the songs so now I'm considering doing a 180 on my thoughts with cover songs.  You just never know which way I'm going to turn, eh?