Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 6
This past week has been pretty productive, and I’m honestly not sure if the rise in temperature is responsible for that or not. On Friday, I spent a decent amount of time jamming out to some new and old songs. I do that by playing guitar and singing live, and the bass and drum parts are being played through a PA system, along with my guitar and vocals. It’s quite invigorating actually. So I’ve been recording a lot of these live sessions too, and that has done a couple of things.
One, it lets songs-in-progress evolve a little more. It’s less sterile, in a good way, and so often times the weak parts of songs will be more apparent, and then I’ll fix them. Generally, when constructing songs, they don’t gestate naturally. I just come up with a few different parts and put them in a random order. Well, not random, but not exactly calculated either. Anyway, yeah, playing them “live” helps them become just plain better sounding. I don’t know of any magic note progressions or whatever to make a song awesome. I, like anyone else armed with ears, can listen to a popular song and figure out the song structure. Verse/verse/chorus/verse or whatever, but I don’t even do that. Usually, my decision-making process is very haphazard and if it doesn’t sound ridiculous, then I feel like it’s a stroke of luck.
So that type of evolution is probably pretty common for a musician to take advantage of. Less common, I would say, is someone taking a song that they’ve been satisfied with for years, and end up changing some things about it because it hasn’t been released to the public. For a song I began in 2012 (I think), I did just that. It’s called “Eff It, ” and I might include it on Heat Stroke just because as I listen to it and play along to it aside the brand new songs, it sounds good.
I don’t think my “singing” style has changed over the last 2 years, or even ever, but it’s mostly the way I feel like I’m singing it now has changed the way the song feels to me. Since “Eff It” hasn’t been revealed to anyone, I realize you’ll just have to take my word for it, but actually, maybe not. Maybe I will spruce it up for Heat Stroke, and then post a link to the old version for fun. In short, the vocals original version sounded kind of stitched together. Like, it’s obvious in the chorus for example that there’s at least 2 different takes to get that sound. It’s not bad necessarily; it’s how I wanted it to sound. But now, when I sing all the vocals live, it’s basically impossible to replicate that sound, and so the result is something that makes the song sound more…real. And given how sterile a song of mine can sound because it’s so computer-assisted, the more real the better.
On that note, I’ll say this too because I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before: all the guitar on “Hotter Than a Mothereffer” is one take…I think. I’d need to check to be absolutely sure, but I’m pretty sure it is. And for me, that’s very unusual. I can’t think of any other song I’ve done where I didn’t reuse guitar parts. If you listen closely, you can probably hear little imperfections in the guitar recording here and there. Normally, you wouldn’t hear that in a song of mine because I would paste in a perfect take of the riff so that it sounds like I played it right 8 times in a row, but really didn’t.
In closing, and perhaps I’ve mentioned this before, but I plan to be done with these new songs by the end of September. In the early planning stages, I thought I’d have 5 or 6 tracks. I’d day that’s still an accurate estimation at this point. But I have been known to go on these crazy creative streaks and may end up with 10 songs total by the end of next month. As an update, to date there are 2 finished songs, another 2 that are fairly complete, 3 others that have a decent foundation, and then there’s “Eff It,” the song mentioned earlier in this post that I recorded years ago but didn’t release to anyone.
As always, feel free to leave a comment below, and/or hit me up on Twitter.