The Challenge Progresses, and Other Developments

Well, it's been a week since I officially accepted Jay's proposition to write a "Marshall Brown" song, as he put it.  It's actually gone a lot better than I expected so far.  The song is fully written and rough versions of the guitars, bass, drums, and vocals are recorded.    Now that I have an unpolished but complete set of tracks to work from, it's just a matter of getting clean, polished versions of everything, mixing it down to the final cut, and figuring out somewhere I can upload it to so that I can share it with you.

While I do have a fair bit of time before the deadline I set, I still expect the end result to sound very amateurish.  Partially this will be my own musicianship (especially the vocals, which I'm really going to have to work at improving), but also my inexperience at recording and engineering.  I've already learned a couple things so far; hopefully anyone interested in the topic will find these enlightening:

1.  Don't record vocals without a compressor on the input.  I found a couple articles on home recording suggesting this, and it really does make a world of difference.  The same applies to bass.
2. If your song is structured to leave a bit of space at the end of the chorus before going into the verse, take the time to make sure you've got the right amount.  In recording the vocals, I kept wanting to leave a couple more bars than I had recorded thus far.  As a result, I'm going to have to go back and re-record several parts to add those extra bars in.

I'll share a bit more on the song later (including how I figured out how create a song using my own name without sounding like an idiot), but now I'll take a second to talk about one of my other efforts, which is finding people to play with.  I've started with two approaches so far.

The first is posting on artists/musicians sections of Kijiji and Craigslist, trying to find people with similar musical tastes and goals.  I've had about a half-dozen response so far.  I've already met up at a local jam with a guitarist who got in touch with me, and he seems like he might be an alright candidate, if only for songwriting collaboration.

Which leads me to the second approach I'm trying, attending jams.  I always find jams somewhat tricky, as you need to find songs that both you and the host musicians know or be able to very quickly learn something they know.  If you don't have the most tolerant host and trip all over yourself, it's a good way to make yourself a less-than-favorite attendee in the future.  You only get one chance to make a first impression.  I conclusion, I need to start learning some tunes.

Hopefully I'll find a bit more time this weekend to continue recording my first song for the project, and I'll give you the inside scoop on it and maybe - maybe - even a sneak peek.