First day of Sisyphus production. I start with the drums typically, then bass, and sketching out the melody line along with this. The drums and bass are crucial to the feeling. I've an idea for a main guitar riff.
I Care was the first song where I sketched out a rough guide for this... for my songs so far I've tended to sequence everything, except, since The Anatomy of Emotions, piano, which is often pre-played. I can sometimes struggle to integrate the two methods, as the piano is often very loose and never exactly planned, yet as of this year and perhaps specifically The Jabberwocky, I've started to know what to put in where and how long it should be, and an approximate or exact melody line. So I'm effectively following a standard stuido practice at last; making a skeleton track as a guide and following it with each recording. Until now, only vocals were added in this way, and so always added at the very end.
Now I want to add real guitars. I bought my beloved guitar at the start of 2019, speculatively, though I did love the look and design of it - I knew nothing about guitars, but only recently had to desire to play (or time, but one makes time when incentive is there). As with piano, I don't worry about getting things perfect. Instruments are about personal emotional expression. My 'live art' performances taught me that doing -anything- is valid, so using any sounds a guitar can make can be useful for a song.
Now, for the first time, I can play well enough to use real riffs and segments, so I am doing so. I must get used to using and mixing the different tone and tones. Today I recorded some test tones with different pickup settings. The volume (and so distortion) also changes the sound a lot, and this all with my cheap 'Blaster' amp. I tried recording with no distortion and then adding the distortion later in Prometheus. The results were different again, but the amp has a nicer, softer, distortion, and importantly, the hum, fret noises etc. enchanced too much when post-distorting a 'clean' guitar.
I must avoid procrastination and will get to work on the full song length tonight and record the first real guitars tomorrow. The downside with live recordings is that the timing has to be finalised, so the tempo, at least, must be finalised before I record anything. For this song about Sisyphus, a relentless and perfect rhythm seems appropriate, but I try to avoid it because it can make music sound mechanical and thus less emotional. It can be nice to speed up a chorus, for example.
On we push!
