Leaps and Bounds

I finally started redeeming myself as a producer yesterday when I spent about ten hours working on the songs, finalizing six (six!!) of them for the album. I didn't even leave my house all day. It looked pretty cold outside anyway.

 

Thanks to our shortcut, more-fun method this year of doing almost all of the playing together, rather than track-by-track, a lot of the songs required little more than a fadeout at the end and some volume adjustments in the middle.

 

Others were more tricky. There were a lot of takes of "Iron Kiss" and "Washington, DC," none of them perfect all the way through, so I did elaborate cut-and-paste jobs to get the good bits from various takes. The ending was never the same twice in "Iron Kiss," with different combinations of voice and guitar and drums, which made it hard to synchronize the pieces. I ended up adding one drumbeat and one guitar strum to keep the rhythm, again cut from elsewhere, in between two larger chunks, and consequently there is a little roughness there on the final version, but that's as good as it's going to get.

 

I found, to my delighted surprise, a perfect "b-side" version of "Iron Kiss" amongst all the different takes. I had forgotten that we blew off steam that day by playing a slow swingy version of the song. It's going to go on the album at the end, not acknowledged in the list of songs. 

 

"Kevin, Shake That Bacon" was another challenge yesterday. I already knew I'd have to pair different endings and beginnings, but I thought it would be easy because the song has a very clear break in the middle during which there is some talking (by me) over light guitar picking. What I didn't anticipate was that the break turned out all wrong when we recorded it; you couldn't even hear the guitar under the words, so it sounded like the song came to a screeching halt and I just started having a conversation at the end, then we picked up again. It was unacceptable. 

 

So I re-recorded my speaking part and gave it a groovy echo, and then, drawing on my new, book-learned GarageBand skills, I plucked a pre-fabricated guitar fragment out of the software's selections and looped and layered it underneath my voice. Then I took a snippet of the last notes before the break and looped that with a fade, to make the transition less abrupt. THEN I copied Cerin's guitar strum from the end of the talking part in the original recording and added it to the end of the new talking part, giving it some hyped-up sound qualities for drama, and then linked it all up with the song's ending. Those twelve seconds of the song took forever to get just right, but I'm proud of it. It sounds better than we had originally planned. 

 

The only thing that is left is "Show Me The Way." My brilliant plan to get Chelsea's track after work last week fell through when I learned that she had zipped off to Guatemala for two weeks. My overtures to an alternate singer have gone unacknowledged. I can scarcely bring myself to say it, but I am afraid I am going to have to sing this song myself. It is December 7. It just needs to get done.

 

Leaving that aside, however, I think that the rest of the album is pretty impressive. As anticipated, the sound quality is not as good as if we had recorded track-by-track, but the music is so much better than on "The Aluminum Album." Know Eye Inn Teem definitely delivered this year.