Salesman, Salesman

 I spent day #2 working on "The Worst Salesman Ever", track two from the Defrost Nixon album.  A small tidbit about this one...  I came up with the whole song based around the lyrical idea of a salesman doing anything possible to make a sale, up to and including donating a kidney.  I thought it was a rather funny idea and I got it from watching the series "Lost", where John Locke has a short back story segment about I believe doing sales and failing at it, if I remember correctly (it's been almost a decade, sorry).  I was actually out of work at the time for 6 months due to a layoff and spent many of my day time hours watching "Lost", trying to keep my mind off of the concept that I was out of work.

These sorts of situations are funny because the amount of stress that being unemployed caused me was incredible.  This was after the housing crisis, back in 2009/2010, and therefore countless people were out of work, making the job market pretty tough.  I was going through grueling interview after interview at the time, and it can quickly break your spirits.  "Lost" was my way of escaping from that, and the question remained how much of the series I'd get through before actually getting hired somewhere.  The sad piece was that job hunting was so very time consuming that I pretty much didn't work on music at all, of which in hindsight makes me angry since it was literally the biggest amount of time I have ever had "off".

Anyway, back to "....Salesman"...  I remember getting that lyrical idea, trying to piece it into a refrain, and the next thing I knew I had a new song.  I presented it to the band and we started playing it almost right away and it's really one of the more hit-sy songs on the album, if you will.  I guess all of those hours with "Lost" weren't an actual loss.

I started yesterday as usual fighting with the drums, and I made the mistake of trying to change the Trigger 2 setup in the session which proved to be a rather dumb thing to do.  I'm not a huge fan of Trigger 2, if you haven't already figured that out, and I find it personally pretty hard to work with.  I guess it really depends upon your source material.  If you have a source that's really well recorded and clean, it's probably super easy; my sources, however, are super noisy and the software simply doesn't know what and when to trigger so it's maddening, to be frank.  My recommendation is that once you have Trigger 2 working adequately, don't sneeze for the whole thing will fall apart.  Also, you should note that most people doing demos of this type of software online seem to be working with abnormally clean source material, which is both misleading and annoying.  Don't be fooled.

I ended up reverting an hour and half's work and starting over, and then began the painstaking process of setting up the mix.  At the 3-4 hour mark, I had it whipped together but the clarity in mono wasn't the greatest.  So, after dinner, I went upstairs again and tinkered more, and I think I got it pretty well laid out by the end of that session.  In fact, I think I need to go back to "My Little Jealousy" and do the same thing to that track.

I am going to have to go through the entire song and basically edit each snare hit for the Trigger 2 program since there are quite a few mishits, probably around 20-30.  It's a fairly awful process but will really help in the long run, but that's something to do for another day.

Question - I was recently watching a video about how some people align all their drums apparently in ProTools via Elastic Audio, basically perfecting the hits, timing, etc.  This kind of blew my mind because my thought was why even have a drummer play if you're going to a) change all their timing and hits to be literally on the mark and b) trigger your drum sounds?  It's fascinating to me since so many people will say "real drummers sound SO much better" and yet in post production the common technique seems to be what I just described.  I'm beginning to think that actual drummers and musicians are simply so disconnected from post production that they have no concept of how much their parts are changed and altered.  Something to think about.  For the moment, I'm opting to not alter the playing to this degree but I might change my mind in the future.