Tuesday, October 19, 2010

SpinTunes 2, Round 2, Process Notes 3

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:09 -0400 (EST)

I don't have a lot of time to work on my song tonight, since I need to get a reasonable amount of sleep -- with only a few nights left, I have to pace myself so I don't crash early.

So far tonight, I revised the verse and chorus MIDI melody tracks to better fit my singing range (and just to sound better). I'm going to try to track all new verse and chorus doubled vocals tonight.

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 02:07 -0400 (EST)

Tracking clean vocals with good pitch control is still my Achilles heel, but after many takes I have a verse 1 and chorus 1 that I think I can live with, especially given that I just don't have the time for endless retakes.

I got a scratch take done for verse 2, which will need to be replaced, but it helped me figure out the MIDI notes for the vocoder feeder tracks, and tweak the alignment of various spoken-word clips. The track is still really sparse -- I'm sort of putting my faith in the idea that I can flesh it out with backing instruments pretty rapidly when the vocals are done. That's been the case with my other songs -- I'm better at that part than I am at vocals. I hope that I'm not just deluding myself! But if I get only the vocals done, it's still a track I can submit and it will meet the length requirements.

The vocoder plug-in is behaving for me now! The EVOC 20 Polysynth is my BITCH! It helped when I got a cleaner, better-leveled and better-aligned vocal track to feed it. I was just too tired last night to figure out what was wrong with the source tracks.

Logic just crashed while I was dragging a region to the arrange window (sigh) -- but fortunately it seems to have saved everything. It's crashing now only an average of once per project, and I haven't lost any work since I upgraded to Logic Pro 9. Considering that's 40 or 50 hours spent editing in an immensely complex application, I think that's actually not a bad record.

Bedtime for tonight. I'll be woken up in about 5 hours by my wife getting ready to take our oldest son to school, and likely before that by a cranky baby, but I may be able to get an extra hour or so of sleep in before I have to start my work day. Eyes... stinging... carpal tunnel... acting up... I'm too old to stay up this late night after night!

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