Circles turn / and swirl the other way
 Depending which way you should go
 Choose a side of this divide
 Something only you will know

 Look to the west, the water flows back home
 The other way is to the sea
 Four hundred miles across that ground
 Watch it flow away from me

 Balancing / upon the razorâ€s edge
 Never feeling so alive
 Find yourself at the top of the world
 Searching for the other side

 Look to the west, the water flows back home
 The other way is to the sea
 Four hundred miles across that ground
 Watch it flow away from me

 The water knows the way back home
 It knows where you should be
 Follow the water on its way back home
 Follow it back to me

 Look to the west, the water flows back home
 The other way is to the sea
 Four hundred miles across that ground
 Watch it flow away from me
 Stare down your uncertainty
 Turn away from the sea
 In half a mile youâ€ll be back home
 Water brings you back to me

In 2010 I wrote to Darrin of Sha-Pink and asked him to convince me to sign up for the RPM Challenge. Sha-Pink had participated the year before and I was intrigued. He convinced me to give it a shot and I chose to write a concept record based on the stories Doc had told over the years on Insignificast. backstage stories told tales of the time Doc worked for a carnival, how he collected action figures, the time he went to a donkey show, but the donkey got sick, how he and his wife won a contest in Cherry magazine and ended up in a porn musical (really – Captain Lust and the Pirate Women), the circumstances around someone shooting him, and the time he spent in jail. It awoke a musical spirit in me and gave me a confidence to write and perform my own music and the experience of RPM 2010 fundamentally changed me as a person. I owe a large debt to a few people who helped make that happen: Darrin, Andy Samford (he played a lot of guitar for me and helped me through the record), Clarke (he sang on a song on that record. He just contacted me out of the blue), Amelia (for giving me the confidence to think of myself as a “real” musician), and Sam.

One of the things that prompted me to record the record was my new guitar. In December of 2009 this happened.

After the album was complete I sent a copy to Sam and we surprised Keith and Doc by playing it on the show. It shocked and amazed Doc (pictured on the right at Sam’s kitchen table. Yes, that’s moonshine in the jar next to the Lysol.) and when we visited them in person in April he looked me in the eye and said “How did you know?” I knew because I had listened and paid attention. A couple of weeks later they played a cover of one of my songs from someone named Lane Sullivan. You know him better as Brian from A Beautiful Scene, and that’s how we met.

A year later Sam and Doc repeated their act of kindness, this time thanking Andy, who they had never met, for playing on my albums.

As the years went by I was finally able to pay Sam for an instrument. He built me a lovely jazz bass in 2016, but would only accept $300 for it, which I think is less than he had in it in parts, not to mention shipping.

Over the years Sam suffered from back issues. I think he had gone through at least two surgeries before I met him and had two more since then. It seemed like his last surgery had stuck, but when his wife died a few years ago Sam started being a little less careful. It was no surprise to hear a few months back that he was having issues again. Slowly but surely the issues got worse and one of his legs stopped working quite right. In true Sam fashion when the doctors mentioned that they might have to amputate one leg below the knee he became incredibly excited because it meant he could have a peg leg. No wheelchair for Sam.

Sam was scheduled for surgery in mid-January, but never made it that far. He collapsed the first weekend in January and had to be taken to the hospital because he couldn’t walk. They initially thought it was a slipped disc, but within a couple of days they informed him that he had stage four cancer: esophogeal, spinal, kindey, and liver. He also had ascities, which is a fluid buildup and the likely source of his leg problems. The doctors still proceeded with a back surgery, putting 11 screws in his back, but also performing a liver biopsy along the way. They got him up and walking and he was able to take a few steps, but eventually struggled. At that point the doctors began talking about cancer treatment plans and how he could go home, but within a few days they changed course and told him he was going to a rehab home. That’s when he snapped. Cookie had died in a rehab home and he told them there was no way he was going into one. He bought a wheelchair and checked himself out. He was home by that evening. That was January 20.

Things were on the upswing as he began eating better and a circle of friends came by to visit or to help care for him. He was able to walk a bit. By early February he was regularly in therapy, but it was a struggle. The leg muscles weren’t cooperating much.

On February 10 the doctors started chemo. It took three days before Sam responded to any of my texts, and when he did he told me he felt awful. By Tuesday, February 16, he was back in the hospital. His feet, legs, bowels, and bladder were all problematic. That morning they ran him through two CAT scans, ten x-rays, and seven MRIs. He told me the doctors were gathering a team like on an episode of House.

By Friday the doctors came in and told him there was nothing they could do. He’s researching hospice facilities to choose where he will die. He doesn’t have much time left, but at least he’ll have good drugs. When I told him how sorry I was about the news he responded with “At least I lasted longer than Rush Limbaugh”.

Still Sam.

The song is pretty silly. It’s based on a cartoon I saw on Facebook.

I wrote some silly lyrics, Clarke added some fun keys, and I dug in on harmony vocals. Oh, and I finally played a bass part I sort of like. That only took 12 years.

Iâ€m proud of you, you made it this far, Itâ€s been a challenging year
Youâ€ve stared it down, youâ€ve faced head on, A triumph over fear
As if you needed more to think about, In times such as these
Your brain fires up as the lights go out, And leaves you with this decree

Every C in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently
Take some time to roll that around, tell me what it means
Every C in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently
Close your eyes now, go to sleep

You hoped for safety, a blessed respite, From all the trials of the day
You knew you could make it despite the strife, You knew you could find a way
You smile to yourself, youâ€re satisfied, You let out a contented sigh
How could you know one you closed your eyes, Youâ€d deal with this surprise

Every C in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently
Take some time to roll that around, tell me what it means
Every C in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently
Close your eyes now, go to sleep

You have disease on the news and election results
And politicians who need a muzzle
Yet just when youâ€re ready to drift off to sleep
Your brain gives you this puzzle

Every C in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently
Take some time to roll that around, tell me what it means
Every C in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently
Close your eyes now, go to sleep
Close your eyes now, go to sleep
Go ahead now, try to sleep

While listening to “Tonight” I became convinced that the guitars just aren’t quite right. I’m going to have to come back and either re-record them or add some synths to fill in the same spot in the mix. This is partially a step back, but it’s also progress, I guess.

Speaking of progress, I mostly wrapped up “In The Eye”. I have a note about checking the drum pattern for variation, but otherwise it’s done. The only remaining issue is determining if the lead vocal is a final or not. The Neve preamp I used has a compressor built into it and it can cause some slight distortion at times. I may need to go back and re-record to remove those bits. If it were a louder song I wouldn’t bother, but the vocal sort of sits out front on this one.

So there’s not much here today beyond a progress report. I did just remember that Grant sent me a drum take for “Pacific Ocean” that I haven’t reviewed yet, so that song could be moving to the mix pile soon. Hopefully I can start talking more about the songs rather than the recording soon.

I spent most of the day fleshing out “Divide”, adding a number of adornments. First off, I added a melodica to the bridge using the Freelodica Kontakt library. It sounds surprisingly good for something that was free. Speaking of free, I went looking for something different and I saw that I had a recent free download from Native Instruments: Yangqin (no link because NI seems to have made it disappear after making it free for the holidays). It’s a Chinese dulcimer with a number of variations and articulations that allow it to sound like a hammered piano at times and the soundtrack to a kung fu movies at others. Layered in with a piano it really adds an interesting texture. Speaking of pianos, I was able to use my favorite library, Piano In Blue, which is a direct sample of the piano used on the Miles Davis classic “Kind Of Blue”. It’s awesome. I also layered in some shaker and tambourine from Kontakt libraries. We’ll see how well that goes, but recording live shaker or tambourine trends to accent my inability to maintain rhythm on anything other than guitar.

After spending all that time on “Divide” I moved on to “Breathe”, which was down to just needing a new bass line and a revised sax solo. The bass part before was fine, but felt tight rather than laid back, so I slightly simplified it and fell into a better groove. I was starting to feel pretty good because I was making progress and I looked at my bass list. “Excuse Me” was on the list so I opened up the session and saw a muted bass part. What was this? I didn’t remember playing anything. When I unmuted it I remembered that MattF had sent me a part, but that I was waiting for another take because this one was a little busy. I decided to listen to it again to make sure I was right and as soon as I turned it down a bit it dropped into place and sounded right. I listened through 5-6 times to be sure, and, yes, it was right. I messaged Matt who questioned whether I really meant it and convinced him that I did. When I later shared the track it received some pretty positive feedback, so I’m pretty sure I’m right.

Later in the evening Dan sent me a note telling me that he had scratched in a solo for “Hiding In Plain Sight” and wanted me to check it to see if he was on the right track. I dropped it into Logic and listened. When the first few notes started I nearly began to cry. He had the right tone and feel for a song I’m putting a lot of weight behind. I listened through a few times and dropped Dan a note letting him know how pleased I was. This is the song that sent me into such a tailspin on Sunday and now I could see a path to getting it right. Shortly thereafter I asked Dan if he was interested in joining Letter Seventeen for the rest of the record and he accepted, so I think we have another member now. Heh.

I hit the wall.

I started working on guitars for “Hiding In Plain Sight”. It was the last on the list needing electric guitars, but it is also the song that is the most important to me on the record, so it was critical that I get it right. A few years back I had an important song that I ended up compromising on and I’ve regretted it ever since. And that’s where the trouble started.

Chasing the demo is horrible. We all do it and we all say we shouldn’t and won’t, but we all do. You record a scratch version of the song and it sticks in your head and then when you come back to play it everything sounds different. So you go back to the scratch track thinking that you can just use that and then you remember that you left mistakes in it and didn’t care because “it’s just a scratch track”. But it’s the sound in your head and your hands can’t match that and even if you double the guitars and all of these other cool parts it’s just not the same and you keep trying over and over and making mistakes and punching in and the noise in your head starts to get louder and louder and nothing you do it right and then you think you’re finished and you listen back and hate everything and hear mistakes that you need to punch in over but for some reason the same guitar settings sound different now and everything is wrong and you hate yourself and your complete lack of talent because you’re just a hack and this song is so important and you should just give up.

That was Sunday, recording guitars. I’m going to do something else on Monday and revisit the guitars later.

Guitars. That’s what Saturday was all about: guitars. And, more importantly, a chance to break out the Fender Blues Jr. and mic it up. I’ve been alternating between the little Vox and the Micro Terror running into the Blackstar cab in the isolation box, but I wanted more clean umph, so it was time to call on Mr. Fender. This introduces some issues because the Fender is a tube amp and turning it on and then putting it in a closed box creates some heat, but I tend to stop and open up the box regularly, so things never seem to get more than a little bit warm. Still, it makes me think that I need a more powerful tube head so that I can use the Blackstar cab with clean or slightly broken up tones. That’s something to consider going forward.

As an added plus I was extremely happy to discover that my mic setup worked great with the Fender with almost no change to positioning. In fact, the ribbon mic sounds a lot better and is far more useful in the mix now.

I recorded the rhythm parts for “Pacific Ocean”, “Escape Route”, and “Person”, laying down at least two tracks for each song on different guitars. For “Person” I ended up with five guitars, including a short section layering in the Dano12. I’m sure I’ll dial that back as that works out to 10 guitar tracks (2 mics each), but it’s a starting point. If all goes as planned I’ll be able to wrap up guitars on Sunday with “Tonight” and “Hiding In Plain Sight”, assuming that when I listen back to Saturday’s recordings I’m still okay with them. Then I can move on to lead guitar, which I will probably mostly farm out.

Speaking of lead guitar, you’ll notice that I really only recorded guitars for three songs. That doesn’t seem like much for a day, and it’s not until you learn that I spent well over an hour working through a guitar solo for “Pacific Ocean”, looping parts, composing, re-playing, and switching between three guitars, only to listen back and hate what I had recorded. Luckily, I have Andy’s email address, so I dropped him a note asking for help. About three hours later I had three solo takes that I eventually combined into one harmonic solo. I’m lucky to have such talented friends.

My goal for Sunday is to wrap up the rhythm guitars and move on to bass as well as map out which lead parts I will play and which ones I will send to others. I’m also hoping to review a few drum takes from Grant. We’re getting close on a few songs, so I’m hoping to move some to final sooner rather than later.

Onward and upward. Things are still progressing well. I’m hoping to share some more demos and perhaps the stories behind songs in the coming days.

When I got down to working on the album again I started by reviewing some new keys and vocals Clarke recorded for “Excuse Me”. His parts were pretty brilliant, but they also took the song in a different direction. The song had been acoustic and edgy/angry and now it sounded more like The Fifth Dimension. That’s fine. I’m adaptable. I fired off a message to Grant and told him he needed to hear the new version before recording drums and he adjusted his part to fit. He was able to send me a take that worked right away, so that gave us two tracks in the DRUMS COMPLETE pile! But now I listened to the vocals and they sounded too edgy; too biting. Since apparently VOCALS ARE NEVER DONE, I turned on the mic and started layering in harmonies and a softer backing vocal to dull the edge. It worked, although I took it a bit too far in places and Clarke had to (gently) nudge me back. He’d already put a hat on a hat in the song, I didn’t need to also layer it in glitter. That being said, the song now sound less like Bob Dylan and more like The Free Design. Well, except without a bass. MattF and I are still going back and forth on how busy or laid back to be in places.

Speaking of Matt, we came up with a nice little workflow bit. He sent me a bass take and I dropped it into the song. Rather than write notes back and forth I just added an audio track to the song and gave notes to him on top of the song, just like we would if we were in the same room. It worked really well.

Since I brought up workflow, here’s a little something for those of you using Logic to consider if you’re not already doing it. The project management commands to consolidate and clean up projects are extremely helpful. Consolidate copies the sound files into the project, so for me that means I can import the drum tracks and if I move or delete the source Logic won’t freak out about missing files. Clean up removes old backups and what it calls “unused files”. I put that in quotes because it doesn’t capture all of them. To get rid of all of the extra files you need to open up the audio bin and choose Edit-Select Unused and then delete those. I’ve found that by following these steps I can often cut the size of a project file by 30-40%.

Back to progress. I knocked out the last of the acoustic guitar parts by recording a new guitar part fo “In The Eye”. I decided to record it Mid-Side for depth and also just to do something different, so I broke out the tube mic again (it’s the only figure-8 mic I have). For those of you who are unfamiliar, M/S recording is where you take one mic straight on as you normally would and also record a figure-8 mic turned at 90 degrees so that the null point faces you and the 8 goes to the left and right. Some people place the mic capsules directly above one another and others put them at the same height with the mid mic in front. Once you have the recordings you duplicate the figure-8 track and pan one left and one right. When you first play them you won’t hear much because the two figure-8 signal phase cancel one another, but if you flip the phase on one you suddenly have this wide and wonderful sound. I liked it so much that I also used it for a short nylon string solo part in the song.

With acoustics now out of the way it’s time to start working through electric guitar and bass as I figure out which bass and lead parts to farm out to others. It’s going to be a busy weekend.

I moved on to reviewing acoustic guitars on a few tracks to see if I could mark acoustics as done. Surprisingly, I was pretty happy with what I’d recorded thus far. I had to do a little tweaking to the timing of one chorus on “Excuse Me”, but that worked well enough and sounded natural. I reviewed the guitar and mandolin tracks for “Divide” and tried to figure out what other acoustic instrument I could add, leading to a lengthy detour that mostly ended with me finding out that the intonation on my dulcimer is questionable at best and that “owning” and “playing” an autoharp are two different things.

This led me to jump to trying out electric guitar parts for “Excuse Me”, a song just screaming for a jangly sound. That meant it was time for the Danelectro 12 to make an appearance. I checked my pedal board for options, but was actually happiest with the guitar as-is with a little reverb and some compression. My initial thought was to run it through my little Vox amp, but the key word there is “little” and the guitar quickly caused the ACTV4 to break up far too much, even at low volumes. So I swapped out heads to the Orange Micro Terror on a clean setting. I’m recording amps with two mics and I was able to to create some width by panning the mics a bit apart from one another. They’re not terribly wide (+20/-20), but the panning seems to create some space. We’ll see if the idea sticks.

The 12 string was nice, but there still seemed to be something missing and there was a bit of grit to the sound, so I recorded another track with my Gretsch 5420 through the Vox (it didn’t break up so much with the Gretsch) and layered that in. I also tried a short lead line with the 12 string which may or may not make it into the final product. The next step will be to review the key and vocal parts Clarke sent me (I wasn’t expecting vocals!) and to see what MattF comes up with on bass. I’m looking forward to that.

As all of this was going on Grant called me and we talked through the various drum parts, reviewing which songs just needed a decent take and which ones we had arrangement notes on. During the discussion he challenged my idea that “Divide” needed drums during the whole song and asked me to review the drum take he’d already sent, which started at the end of the first chorus. Listening back, his instincts were right and the take was good, so I texted him and told him we had one song to mark as DRUMS COMPLETE. Woohoo!

Next up is reviewing various instruments and eliminating them from needing work. I think I’m done with acoustics, so I suspect the weekend will be filled with electric guitars. That will either be thrilling or frustrating. Still, things are progressing extremely well.

I say the phrase “vocals complete” is mostly true because I’m pretty sure I need to revisit the harmonies for “Tonight”. They’re cool in isolation, but they’re hitting my ear as wrong and I need to fix that. I’m just not sure I need to do that today as I’m quite tired of singing right now.

Early in the afternoon Grant contacted me to tell me he was having trouble with the timing on “Excuse Me”. The chorus timing was off and neither the guitars nor click matched up. I dug into it and heard the problem when I played the guitars against the click. They were way off and sped up, then took a while to recover again in the verses. But then I listened without a click but with the drum scratch. It largely matched up. I had followed the drums, not a click. This is actually a pretty big deal to me as it means I was actually reacting to other musicians, not just my own internal clock.

Grant tried another take where he ignored me and just concentrated on the click while I made a copy of my guitar tracks and aligned the scratch drum track and guitars more closely to the grid in the choruses. When I dropped in his revised drum part they matched up. Woohoo! I don’t have to re-record the guitars! Of course, now I’m going to have to check the alignment of the vocals. It never ends….

As I said, Tuesday was all about vocals, and almost all of them were for the song “Waiting”. The lead vocal proved to be trickier than I expected and I really didn’t want to fall back to doubling it if I could help it. I did, however, want to create a build. I eventually created a lead vocal that I was reasonably happy with and moved on to creating backing vocals and harmonies. I tried accenting parts and various double and high lines, but nothing much was working. I eventually landed on recording a fifth harmony that was simple, but was actually harmonically correct. Once I heard it, it was easy to replicate and I went searching for the third. That took a little work, but I recorded that one as well and…. there was a wall of voices. THAT was what I had in my head and I had just created it (without pitch correction, mind you) for the first time. Once I had that chorus working I went back and re-worked the bridge (which really probably still needs more work….) and was able to check off vocals as complete. Given that Clarke and I had largely finished the instrumentation already (the core of the song is mine, all of the weird stuff you like is his) “Waiting” became the first song to make it to the Editing/Cleanup Trello card. That’s the one right next to Mixing.

I then went back and revisited “Breathe”. The vocal still just sounded shaky to me, so I broke down and recorded a double, but with a slightly different vocal approach. Once I panned the two voices hard left and right and added some delay I felt good enough to call it a night. We’ll see how I feel about the vocal on day ten and if I can finally move past the voices and get back to working on the bass and sax parts.

Next up: vocals for “Divide” and “In the Eye” and then the one I’m holding for last, “Hiding In Plain Sight”. I need that one to be last just in case I fry my voice singing it.

My first attempt at backing parts was largely another double of the main vocal line. It added heft, but really just ended up making sections louder. So I moved on to harmony, or, more accurately, squealing into the mic completely out of tune and out of touch with the song. Yeah…. harmony. Still, I really bore down and tried to find appropriate notes to sing and eventually ended up with four backing tracks, two low and two high, singing some interesting lines (Clarke told me I was singing “inside harmonies”) that seem to work well enough in isolation, but may be dissonant in the whole mix. Clarke was happy with what I did, but I think that was largely pride in me getting the parts right. I’m betting I’ll be coming back to this one later.

Suddenly it was getting late in the day. I had spent way too much time on Tonight – nearly four hours just for vocals. I decided to take on Excuse Me next. No, not the Peter Gabriel song. An acoustic (for now) romp that’s likely to turn into something more like a Byrds song. Grant had given me a drum scratch but my prior demo was a single mic recording of guitar and vocal. My intent was to record the vocal and add the final guitar later, but since the original demo drifted a bit in places, I couldn’t do that. Instead I ended up playing a guitar part on my Taylor along with the drums and demo and then coming back to record a first-pass vocal. After that I recorded a second guitar part on my Martin. I panned the two guitar parts left and right and it became apparent that the Taylor was off in places rhythmically, so I ended up re-recording that part. After well more than an hour I now had a base of the song, but only scratch vocal, which sort of negated the purpose of vocal day. I came back through and punched in the main vocal until I was satisfied with it and I noticed something. It had a different character than normal. It was exceedingly dry, but also very present. Jarrett had posted something in #slack earlier in the day about using a mic stand to hold up a moving blanket behind him and I had replicated the setup. I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty confident this made a significant difference in the sound of the vocal. It’s enough of a difference that one of my throwaway songs is now one of favorites. We’ll see what happens once Clarke starts adding parts.

All told I ended up recording vocals for close to seven hours on Sunday, locking in what I hope are final takes for Escape Route, Pacific Ocean, and Person. I tried some rather dense and layered harmonies in places which took quite a bit of time, but I struggle a good bit with harmonies both in terms of actually singing them and in arranging them correctly. Clarke has already sent me a note about a part I sang wrong, so I’ll get to fix that on Monday. I’m glad he did so, though. I asked him to let me know or to play a guide track for me if he heard a harmony that made sense. I’m not sure if he’s going to be singing on this record as he has trouble finding time to sing when his roommates aren’t around, so I’ll take the advice where I can get it.

Speaking of guide tracks, I thought I’d share a trick Joe Gilder taught me just in case you don’t know it. For backing vocals I will often load up a male choir patch and play the part I need to sing, then sing along with that. It helps me stay on key better and keeps me from drifting off and following the lead vocal, which is something I often do. As an added bonus, if you are singing oohs and aah you can leave the choir in the mix, just set down really low to add some extra body to the vocals.

While I was recording vocals Grant was bashing away on new drum takes for Breathe and Person and we’re getting close. We found an issue where Clarke and I transition from a bridge to solo block at a different time than Grant, but that’s to be expected with scratch tracks. One thing that is fun is that Grant is now adjusting his parts to open up the high end so that Clarke’s keys are more prominent. As I’ve been saying, we’re working together this year far more than ever rather than just assembling parts. As Clarke said yesterday, “It’s part of being a band and not just Tim & sidemen.” Little do they know that I’m going to go register timandthesidemen.com now….

Finally, I’m still circling around Breathe. I like the vibe, but I’m not sure about the bass. I either need to find a way to be more laid back in my playing or I need to find a different bass player. I have Matt Ferrara on speed dial just in case.

Breathe started out as part of a concept record where I was going to reuse the titles and basic chords/structure of the songs on Dark Side of the Moon for an entire album. I still might revisit the idea, but so far I only have one song. The chords are sort of the same, but also different. Also, after Grant scratched in a drum part he suggested making it longer, so I did. I had the beginnings of a sax solo sketched out, but the song was missing the organ sounds I knew it needed. I started out by adding some Rhodes-like chords to fill out a little space and then dove in Komplete Kontrol to look for a proper organ sounds for some fills. It’s not the most complex musical part ever, but I think it works. Still, if Clarke decides to replace my parts with something in the same spirit, I won’t be heartbroken.

Once the basic parts were done I went looking for weirdness to bring in and out at different times, eventually landing on some atmospheric sounds and a chimey bell-like sound that is actually supposed to sounds a bit like an analog phone ringing. The sounds are all strange, but they give the song an interesting feel that was missing when it was just guitar and bass. We’ll see how I feel in a couple of days.

Speaking of Clarke, he re-appeared Saturday evening after being silent for a few days. I figured he was just busy, but it seems that he wasn’t seeing any of the notifications for the Trello updates and thought I’d gone quite for 4-5 days. He’s now back on board and we’re chugging away.

Next up, vocals. The house is all mine for a few days, so it’s time to start working on the louder or more embarrassing bits….

If you’re interested, here’s the current demo of Breathe, complete with scratch drums, placeholder sax parts, and a vocal that is so scratch that the third verse is just a copy-paste of the first.

As I worked on the changes to the song I re-recorded the guitar and the dance-oriented song began to take on a more muscular, and even slightly menacing tone. Honestly, it went from dance pop to something more akin to The Cure. It wasn’t what I expected, but it’s where both the extended length and playing against the drums led me. This happens with songs during RPM. They end up being different than what you initially heard, but likely better. We’ll see. I just know that now I need to works some keys into the song.

As the afternoon progressed Grant pinged me to ask about the last of the drum scratch tracks. I told him to work on Pacific Ocean, Person, and finally Excuse Me, which is the most straightforward tune. Before he recorded a take of Pacific I made sure that he had the latest version of the song because Clarke had added some synths that took the song in a decidedly 80s direction. It’s a good thing I did that because it totally changed the part Grant played, leading him to accent different aspects of the song and introducing a half-time bridge. That change now has me wanting to change my guitar part to at least match the feel in the bridge, if not pick up the groove from the other two for the rest of the song. This is how our collaboration has grown over the 10+ years the three of us have worked together in some form or fashion. I’m following where they are leading to make my song better.

Person gave Grant quite a workout as he bashed away at the track, but he had the blessed relief of Excuse Me and its relative simplicity. And just like that the drum scratch tracks were done. On February 5. We’ve had multiple instances in the past where the first drum takes haven’t arrived until well after February 20, so this is downright amazing. It also simplifies the workflow tremendously as I can build the song against the drum track rather than shoehorning it in. This, my friends, is progress.

Now I just have to figure out what to do about all of the guitar solos….

I eventually ended up back in the studio and decided to play bass along to the dance track “Tonight”. Grant had worked up a scratch drum part to go along with the drum machine loop underpinning the song and I wanted to see how things would sound if I played against a drummer rather than a machine. The part isn’t particularly difficult, but I’m a guitarist playing bass rather than a bass player. I’ve laid down bass tracks for 12+ years now, but they’re always a struggle. This year I’ve been putting extra effort into getting the tracks recorded right such that I’ll have little time correction or other chicanery in the mixing phase. So I bore down and…. it actually sounded really good. I locked in with Grant and we tended to flow together. It wasn’t perfectly on the grid, but it sounded like we were playing together rather than it being two parts sitting on top of one another.

From there I decided I wanted to add a sub-bass. I recently watched a YouTube video where the artists created a low bass midi part with a sine wave oscillator and a gate to add sub-bass to a track. I set up a midi bass part playing whole notes following the bass line. I then tried gating it to the drum machine so that the bass sounds only came through on the kick. It worked, but didn’t sound quite right because it was so on grid that it accented where Grant and I were not. So then I tried the gate on Grant’s kick. That sort of worked, but the drum machine is playing four on the floor and Grant is sort of doing that, but not quite. That led me to try something different. I assigned the kick and snare to a bus and set a reasonably high threshold for the gate. BOOM. There it was. Kick on 1 and 3 and snare on 2 and 4. And when I raised the gate a bit it wasn’t triggered by the beginning of the attack, but was slightly behind, making the sub pulse and breathe. Another added side benefit came during a tom roll where nothing caused the gate to open, so the sub drops out for that roll, making it stand out more.

Music is fun.

I decided to take a break for lunch, but just before I did Ed messaged me to tell me he was getting ready to record the solo for the song. That was wholly unexpected as I usually don’t expect any contributions from other RPMers until at least mid-month. By the time I finished eating I had a guitar solo waiting for me. I dropped it in the song and then realized that the bridge sounded sparse. Since it was a half-time breakdown I decided it needed something metal-ish (well, as metal as I can be….) so I layered in a harmonizer, octave, and doubler with some distortion and played two of the same part an octave apart. It’s a bit odd, but I think it works for a song like this.

The next song on my list was Divide, which is largely acoustic. Grant sent me a drum scratch idea where he loosened the snare wires and then played his toms and snare. It gave it an almost Peter Gabriel feel and really reminded me of Hard Sun by Indio. The problem was that my demo had some sort of weird latency on the vocal that made it almost impossible to play against, so I recorded a scratch vocal to get past that problem.

Now that I had a usable demo I turned to the guitar part. I listened to what I already had. It’s a simple acoustic part and was perfectly fine. Did I really need to re-record it because of an arbitrary rule around a competition no one actually wins? The answer was no. So I moved on instead. I added a simple bass part (flatwounds!) and some mandolin. Then I considered other instrumentation, so I turned to Komplete. And…. there were problems.

I bought Komplete earlier this year to gain access to the huge library of sounds. It wasn’t cheap, so I like to look for places to use it whenever possible. I loaded up Komplete Kontrol and started searching for reed-based instruments, but almost nothing showed up, not even Kontact sample instruments. This made no sense at all since KK exists solely to allow you to search through all of the Native Instrument products for sounds and flavors. I did some digging in the preferences and online and eventually discovered that KK wasn’t looking at my entire external hard drive for some reason, only a subset. It was missing most of my instruments. I eventually found how to force a reindexing and 15 minute later or so I was back in business checking out odd sounds to add to the song. That’s the part of RPM no one plans on. We all think about the musical ideas and finding time to record, but what about that half hour lost to getting a sound library to work right?

In other news, while all this was going on Grant dropped another two drum scratch tracks on me for Tonight and Escape Route. I’m not used to this level of engagement so early in the month from the guys. It’s great!

Finally, here’s the unmixed demo of Stealing From Ed. The player link will work until I replace the song, I guess.

I signed up for your assignment by accident it seems
When your song popped up on my computer screen
Your metal riff got turned to indie pop
Once I started playing it I could not stop

I think Iâ€m stealing from Ed
This one came from his head
He wrote the chords that I read
Thatâ€s right, Iâ€m stealing from Ed

He said itâ€s okay, if that makes it right
Thatâ€ll help avoid any copyright fight
And, to be honest, I changed a thing or three
At least thatâ€s what Iâ€ll say if the judge asks me

I think Iâ€m stealing from Ed
This one came from his head
He wrote the chords I read
Thatâ€s right, Iâ€m stealing from Ed

When it came time to turn to the bridge
I used precisely what he assigned to the kids
I wonder if heâ€ll expect a co-write
I probably should, it seems only right

I think Iâ€m stealing from Ed
This one came from his head
He wrote the chords that I read
Thatâ€s right, Iâ€m stealing from Ed

I recorded my strat first using a two mic setup in my isolation box with an Audix I5 on the speaker and a Bumblee RM-5 ribbon microphone about 6-8 inches back. The ribbon is in an interesting beast here. First off, it’s a bit close to the amp, largely because of the size of the iso box. Then there’s the matter of the two sides of the figure-8 mic. One is facing the amp, but the other is almost touching the sound treatment in the box. This means that the back side of the ribbon mic, which usually imparts some aspect of the room into the recording, is essentially deadened. I’m not too worried about this, though. The ribbon is there for some low-end and midrange tone to compliment the high end captured by the I5. Honestly, the ribbon sounds pretty awful on its own.

My second pass through with guitars was with a Les Paul. I wasn’t necessarily planning on using two guitars on this song, but I figured I’d record something and see if it worked. The setup was largely the same, but I changed amps for an additional flavor change. Also, I’ve noticed that I play the Les Paul differently than the strat. If anything, I move a wee bit slower, which created some challenges on a song as fast as this. More on that in a sec.

I moved on to recording bass and most of it went well. I had to punch in a few spots because the speed of the song made things sound sloppy. Still, there are some stops in the song and I found that things were mostly in sync at those points. I took some time to review the guitars and realized that I had a little bit of latency showing up in the files, so I nudged them slightly to the right and things seemed to lock in place with the drums. Well…. mostly. The bass still sounded off, so I tried looking for areas where my time drifted. After about 15-20 minutes of trying to determine if I needed to punch in more parts or slide things around with Flex, I noticed something. The waveforms of the bass and strat seemed to line up, but the Les Paul seemed a little early. I muted the LP and suddenly everything sounded locked in: drums, guitar, and bass. So I found one of the stop sections and moved the LP track ever so slightly to the right to align with the other two tracks. BINGO! We were locked in. So that second guitar was either dragging all along or was recorded with additional latency. This is worth noting in the future.

While all of this was going on Clarke started to send me keyboard parts. A lot of them. Some of what he sent is downright brilliant and a good bit of it took the songs in directions I hadn’t considered. I’ve learned over the years to follow these directions rather than rejecting them, so even the bits I’m not sure about are in for now. There are two reasons for this: 1) I’ve learned that other people often have as good, if not better better, ideas than me. That’s true even if I don’t necessarily like them at first because they don’t match the sounds in my head. 2) Part of working with others is learning how to make a give and take work. I truly believe we make a better product as a group than we would in an environment where I’m the captain and everyone else is just doing what I say. So I listened to all of the parts Clarke sent and offered encouragement about the parts I like, excitement about new ideas I hadn’t considered, and questions about tones or parts I wasn’t 100% sold on. Truth be told, there were very few notes about changes, which is great.

So after two days I have guitar and bass for two songs. In the past that would make me feel like I’m behind, but given my focus on trying to get parts right out of the box, I actually feel ahead. If I can keep this up through the weekend I’ll be in great shape. Grant should drop a few more drum parts on me by then and I’ll have a few days with the house to myself coming up where I can make some real noise. Onward and upward.

Day One – Monday, February 1

We’ve done a good bit of pre-work this year, so February begins with 11 (mostly) well-formed songs and some decent guide tracks to use as a starting point. More importantly, Grant and I have done a significant amount of work on the drums already, tuning and testing the setup to really dial in a sound we like. That’s allowed us to do something we’ve never done: start the month with a few drum scratch tracks. It’s hard to overstate the value of these tracks. Playing bass and guitar against real drums is a completely different experience than playing against click or a loop and the final drum tracks will have the same feel, so they’ll fit in with the song better rather than sounding as if they were added in at the end. On the whole it just tightens up the sound.

I had a late start on Monday, but had enough time to work on the bass and two guitar tracks for Breathe. In the past I’ve been trying to created guide tracks for the other guys, so I would try to record full versions of the songs in the first ten days, then dedicate the next ten days to coming back and re-recording as much as necessary. Since we already have guide tracks, albeit very sparse guide tracks, I’m instead focusing on getting the recordings right out of the gate. I ran through the guitar parts and concentrated on getting everything sounding right today, fixing mistakes and really bearing down in places that I would normally move on and call it “good enough for now”. That approach really doesn’t work because the guitar tones aren’t the same later on and something is always just a little off. That’s even more of an issue this year because I’m recording most, if not all, of the electric guitar tracks though an actual amp with microphones rather than using amp sims.

When I listened back to my bass track I liked most of it, but found a couple of sections to be a little quiet. I figured I could just take care of that with compression and moved on, but a couple of notes were slightly mis-timed, so I copied the track (important step there…) and opened up Flex Time in Logic to slightly nudge a few notes. I then decided that since I was there I could bump the volume of some notes with Flex Pitch. It mostly worked and sounded like it would be fine in the mix until…. I listened back a little later and the end of the track sounded warped. I hadn’t touched that part, but as anything Flex is wont to do, there were now audio artifacts in the file. Luckily it was a copy, so I just trashed it and started to go back and repeat the process. Then I caught myself. Wouldn’t it just be easier to punch in the fixes rather than trying to manipulate them? So that’s exactly what I did. Five minutes later I had a bass track I was happy with and without weird artifacts.

Maybe I’m finally learning something after all of these years. I texted Joe Gilder and told him something Dan said it me on #slack. It was as if GIRATS and GIRN collided. He loved that idea. So do I.

Itâ€s different for me
Itâ€s different you see
Iâ€m a catalog artist, holding out for a hit
Back with another record, and I willingly admit
I do this more for me than I ever would for you
I do it because itâ€s what I do

A new album. Ten new songs. All for you. Available for download NOW on Bandcamp and streaming everywhere!

The album is available to stream in all of the usual places (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) as well as on our bandcamp site where you can purchase a download in whatever format you might like. We’ve also put together a set of liner notes (85 MB PDF) that you can download directly from letterseventeen.com or get as part of the bandcamp package.

This record is the result of a lot of hard work and we hope you enjoy it!

Our latest single is part of the Angie Fights Crime project XCHANGE.  AFC wrote 12 songs for 12  of us, and we each wrote a song for him. He recorded our 12 songs and we each recorded one of his songs.

Stay tuned – we have another song just about ready.  It’s the other half of the XCHANGE equation – the song we wrote for AFC.

Interested in a physical CD? They should be available by mid-May.  Become a fan of Letter Seventeen on Facebook and leave a comment on the wall.

We’re nothing if not timely, so here’s a new song taking advantage of the whole “McKayla’s Not Impressed” meme.

Two months after everyone else has forgotten about it.

*sigh*

Regardless, it was a fun song and provided a nice warm-up to our next adventure – a Christmas song for the 2012 RPM Holiday Challenge!

The download link is below the video.

Interested in a physical CD? Become a fan of Letter Seventeen on Facebook and leave a comment on the wall.

Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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I hope you enjoy my version.  I had fun recording it.

edit: and now, the obligatory music video….

Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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I’m proud of what I did here and I hope you enjoy it.

Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Some stories are too good to keep to yourself. Learn why it may not have been the best idea to encourage the kids to sing along to “Donkey Jockey”.

Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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A big thank you to Dawna and the guys at MOSAIK USA for granting permission to play the song.  You can find them at http://mosaikusa.com or http://www.reverbnation.com/mosaikusa

Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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Artificially Intelligent

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I’ve covered another of her songs.  This one is “Like This” from Amelia’s 2011 RPM Album The Rumi Book. Go listen to her album.  It’s totally worth your time. Anyway…. my version of the songs is decidedly darker than hers.  I’m not quite sure how it ended up there, but it did.  I hope you enjoy it.

The new album is once again a product of the RPM Challenge (record and produce 10 songs or 35 minutes of music during February) and will be released in early March.

You can hear Amelia’s original version on her alonteone page.

If you’d like to download or listen to the album, there are links on the right side of the page to do both.  Also, if you are so inclined, please consider becoming a fan of Letter Seventeen on Facebook.

I had a great time writing and recording “backstage stories”.  I hope you enjoy it.

I plan on setting up a detailed web site for the album soon, so please stay tuned….

The daunting task of completing RPM2010 suddenly seems doable.  I can’t speak to the quality of the performances or the production, but that was never the point.  The idea was to see if I could do it.  And now I actually believe that I can.

That’s a great feeling.

You can keep up with my progress on my RPM page.

Allow me to present an interpretation of the 2Guys theme.  I have it in my mind to create a new version of this every month in 2010 to give Randy and Andy something interesting to play with, but we’ll see how that goes.  For now, enjoy my first attempt.