Spring Break

Yikes. First blog post in a while. That's bad. I've done a lot though, and have quite a bit to write about. 

Today was my first real day of tracking. Joel came over and did some guitar work. Pro Tools is pesky. Not as easy to use as Reaper. A problem I ran into right off the bat is not being able to manipulate the click (metronome) and therefore not being able to change the tempo of the project. This means that I don't have any grid to align tracks to, which makes things a little more difficult. My temporary solution was to literally sit there with a mic and record my metronome at the desired tempo for about a minute and a half, and then repeat it in the project. "Ghetto Click Track." 

We recorded two guitar parts for a song on which I will soon be tracking drums. Then at another point bass will be added, and then vocals, and then effecting, and mixing, and mastering, and then I will have my first song! That should be soon. 

Ever since he left basically I've been playing guitar (jeez...has it really been 4 hours?!). I'm teaching myself, and definitely getting better. My fingers hurt though.

Later this week I'm going to have some ladies over to track an acoustic song, which will be cool. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to mic an acoustic guitar or plug it in. Whichever is a better tone I guess. My mics aren't super amazing so it might just be better to do a direct input to the interface. 

On Monday night I went to go see Green Day with my family in Rochester. Weird, I know, but we all love them. They were the first band I ever really got into, thanks to their 2004 album American Idiot. 4th grade, those were the days. I got kind of obsessed. I have all of their music ever released, own both of their live DVDs (and have seen them probably 20 times), saw their broadway show twice (once with Billie Joe Armstrong, the front-man), and had lots of merch and memorabilia all over my walls for a few years. I finally saw them in concert, and it was unreal. They're in their mid-40s, but they rock like they're in their mid-20s. True professionals, and they're just in so much control of everything that they're doing and everything that's going on around them. It was super nostalgic at some points. So needless to say, I had a mean post-concert hangover on Tuesday. 

This Saturday, my band's manager and I are going up to On Point Productions in Binghamton to work on mixing my band's album. That should be sweet for this project, because the studio runs Pro Tools, and I'll have a real engineer showing me the ropes before I do my own stuff. 

That's all for now, but I'll for sure try to blog more regularly. Oops. Peace