This Painting Makes Me Never Want to See You Again

This song was the catalyst. I had had this project on my mind for quite a long time but I soooo lazy that I kept postponing it. I was playing Football Manager 2009 that night and it came to my mind why I kept playing that game when I could be doing something constructive.

So here it is! I started writing the song at 2:00AM and I recorded as I went along. It was 5:00AM when I was finished.



The writing is not very good as you can hear. I just scrapped this two chord sequences (F#m, E, A and C, Am, F, C) and they sounded good together, specially the transition between them. The same with the lyrics, I just wrote them as I went along. I'm not much of a singer but this time I really have to apologize. My throat hadn't recovered from my last cold so it failed me when I try to hit some high notes.

The recording was the real focus here. My main goal with this song was testing the quality of my macbook mic (!) when capturing distorted guitar sounds. Though this little fella is great for voice, it sucks ass for guitars. This time it kinda worked cause I really wanted that filthy garage sound, but I really have to get a decent mic for more ambitious sounding guitars (and I'm yet to try the bass).

Though everything other that the guitar sound was done in Garageband (the recording, arranging, sound bank drum track, voice equalization), I used Audio Hijack for the mp3, cause I don't like the mp3 compression I get with the former.

My favorite thing about this song is that little solo near the end. Using the same distortion as before (just a little tweak to bring up the bass) I added a duo phaser modulation. Hear that strange feedback? I had my effects pedal output connected to the pc speakers instead of an amp, so I used one of the speakers to control that feedback by bringing it close to the pickups with my left hand as I tapped the melody with my right hand. I took a picture so you could understand what I mean:

Notice my left hand holding the speaker near the PUs

That's it for my first post! Comments are very much appreciated!

Why?

As an amateur musician, I never had proper music training, I have learned everything I know by trial and error (sometimes just trial, most of the times just error :p) with the help of our good ol' friend the internet.

I recently started recording music on my macbook. I don't use professional software of hardware, just some guitars, small amps, the macbook mic and some digital midi synths. The main reason for this blog is keeping a traveler's journal of my experiments, whether I'm just playing with some effects or dumping some song I wrote in a lazy afternoon.

So why make this public? So anyone can comment, express their likeness or hatred (or apathy) for something I have done, share their own experiences, say how they would have done it, so hopefully I can learn a thing or two about music.

Feel free to comment! Every word you spend your time writing me will be read and taken into account.