Saturday mornings are usually good times for me to write, my sweetheart sleeps in but not me of course – too many years of getting up early to work.
As usual I am working on about three songs at once. I find its just not very productive to try and force it, and this is much easier if you have more than one musical thought going.
I begin to work. I had thought about going thru a tutorial on the tabla that I got from Future Music, but then….well, I figured it would be better to table that and concentrate on the task at hand. And that task would be cranking out as many bones of songs as I could before Jeff comes over on Wednesday. The more structures I have, the more he can comment on them and listen to them. Ideally we would have enough stuff to record for three or four (that is really optimistic!) tunes over the next week or so. That will give me three weeks while he is away to really grind on the arrangements, and I will need every minute of it if we are to get this done by late May or early June. And as you know, sometimes deadlines can be a good thing.
And this session…………well, it didn’t go well, seemed like everything I tried just lead to a dead end. I know this happens, but I hate it when it does, I just didn’t have any good ideas for any of the songs. Finally after about 3 hours I call it quits.
I go upstairs with all the intention of taking a nap. And then it hits me – something so simple, but with the potential of being so cool. I have to go back to the studio.
An hour or so later, my little idea has taken shape. I mean, its just a B section of the song, but that is pretty much what I needed at the time.
Even though its Sunday, lucky me has to work for half the day. I talked to my one and only before I got home. One of the cats managed to bring in a sparrow, but Barbara got it trapped in the spare room and managed to save its life.
Needless to say, this can tire a person out and when I got home, B had just settled in for a nap. It sounded good to me, but as always if I have a chance I will try and write some music, so off to the basement again.
Today it goes good. I work more on the break, and have an inspiration about the drums in the middle section. I take a drum part that I was going to use on a second drum section and drop it into the main drum part, which is a set of Darbukas that I made up in Battery. Man, it just kicks ass! Super! I even write some cymbal parts from the bridge, and a killer like stop.
I do some more work, and then exit Sonar, go into Project five and then back into Sonar, and then Sonar craps out on me. Fatal error, won’t start.
And won’t start. I restart my PC, a couple of times, and do some faultfinding, and guess that it’s a new Reaktor synth that I am using that is a real CPU hog. Finally I give up and start from scratch, almost anyway. I began this song in Project 5, and I was able to reconstruct what I did fairly quickly, like in 45 minutes or so. Everything is going great, but then I try this Reaktor synth and again and bang! It all dies and I am left with another ruined project.
OK, so I am nuts but I like this Reaktor sound, and lucky for me I froze the sound at some point in the second version of the song, so I have a wave file of it.
Now we are on iteration 3, if you can believe it, and this time I don’t even bother with the Reaktor synth, I just grab the wave file and start from there. I am happy to say that finally this works, and I have something that while it may not be 100% exact, is pretty damn close, and I only lose another hour of my life doing it. I have learned a new strategy in that I can dump looped midi files – Cakewalk calls them groove clips – from inside Sonar without having to halt the program, and I am doing this a lot now, let me tell you.
So is there a moral to this story? Not really other than the old saying, save your work often, and pay attention when the computer is telling you its not feeling well.
And oh yeah, its better not to give up, but stay with the problem till you fix it. Cause if you are like me, no one is gonna do that for you.