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Some notes about the
recording:
This is a very special song to me, as you've likely
figured out from reading the above lyrics... it's a song I wrote for
mah honey :) It's quite a bit different than previous songs I've
posted, but I do have a lot of unfinished material that's along the
same vein. I'm not always about super heavy weirdness, ya know
:)
I think this is without a doubt my best work yet.
I spent a ton of time on the details and subtleties... trying to get
nuances just right. From minor changes in MIDI velocities to
micro-tweaking of effects on the vocals, there's no doubt I've
improved in my composition abilities. I still have a long way to
go, and this song is far from perfect if you look close at it... but
I'm still extremely happy with the way it came out, and how well
everything fit together.
There ended up being 15 tracks in the song... half of
them MIDI, and the rest either guitars or vocals. There were two
main vocal tracks, but some of the guitar tracks ended up doubling as
vocal tracks when I needed to add some slight addition to a part here
and there. The old-radio style vocal "effect" I used when
singing the verses was actually done in a pretty simple way: out
of the compressor, I ran the vocals through my Boss guitar EQ pedal,
with some pretty weird settings on it. It did a decent job
creating the desired effect, but you can hear some imperfections here
and there... where the EQ pedal clipped the vocals a little. All
in all though, it did a hell of a job, and I totally love how it came
out.
If you recall some comments I've made on previous
songs, you'll remember me talking about a "click" problem that has
plagued me in my recording. I kept getting these weird static
clicks at random in my wave files... similar to what you would hear on
an old record that has some scratches on it. Well... despite
what you hear above, that problem is still plaguing me... but I found
a way around it. Sound Forge makes a super nice "Click Removal"
noise reduction plug-in. I think it's main purpose is to clean
up vinyl recordings that someone wants to master to a CD. It
worked incredibly well on my song, and you'll have to listen really
damn close to hear any kind of click imperfection. I actually
now think I get those clicking noises simply from my computer itself.
I think they get in the wave file from the very act of the data being
written to the hard drive. I don't have a slow computer or
anything... but I think things may not be quite right somewhere,
causing the clicks to appear at random... possibly having to do with
the hard drive needing to fragment a file in order to write around
some other existing data in its way. I'll figure it out
someday... but at least now I have a way around the problem.
I've been told that the song sounds very Pink-Floyd-ish...
and I think I have to agree... though once you get about mid song, I
think the similarity with Pink Floyd disappears. It really wasn't my
intention to sound like them, believe it or not... it just kinda
happened :)
