blahbedeeblahbedeeblah.
Alright, I’ll try.
I’m having an odd sensation, which I haven’t really had before, or at least not since 1994, the last time I tried to do anything with my old four-track. I’ve never been much of a studio guy, I mean, since working solo with Rob on Slumberland I have learned to ENJOY the studio, rather than find it tedious. But I haven’t really felt much of an itch to do it myself. I enjoy working with Rob and I like what comes out of the studio relationship. But I see it as something that has more to do with him than me. I bring the songs in, but ultimately he works most of the studio magic on them. Which was fine with me, I know very little about it and am not entirely sure I have a very good sonic ear. But lately…
Lately.
Lately I have started to feel the tug. It’s as much Jimmy Ether’s fault as anyone’s. When I went by his studio he played some of the projects he’s working on, and showed me some of the things he’s using to get those sounds. I guess I didn’t realize just how far the home studio had come, how good the midi samples sound now. He played me some drum samples and talked about the string samples, bass samples, and the rest, and it began to dawn on me that I could build complete songs at home. Without having to learn to play the other instruments. I have been planning on setting up a home studio during this long process of trying to make our house livable for us now that we’ve bought it, but I don’t think I really ever thought it would be a genuine studio. I imagined doing demos (and that’s still all I’m really talking about at this point) but in my mind they wouldn’t really be too far removed from what I was doing in ’94. I can only play guitar, and even at that I can only play rhythm. It makes for a pretty limited palette. But now I can see that, given a little patience, I could build whole songs without the need to become a multi-instrumentalist.
As this CD draws to a close, I had been thinking about the next one. I had some ideas already about it, what it would be about and how it would sound. But it also seemed very far off. This CD has been very costly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been amazingly cheap, relatively speaking, but in terms of my financial abilities this CD is far above my normal reach. If not for buying the house (the arcane details of which I won’t go into, but we ended up with a small chunk of money when all was said and done) I wouldn’t have been able to pay for recording. If not for me losing my job and cashing in my 401k in anticipation of financial distress (that thankfully never came due to well-placed freelance work and unemployment checks) I wouldn’t be able to afford to put the CD out once it’s done. It’s been a long process of running up debts and hoping something would come along at some point to pay them off. It’s not a set of circumstances I can see repeating themselves, and so I honestly didn’t know how soon I might be able to attempt it again. But now I can see that I have the option of producing SOMETHING, and something of quality, from here, or possibly a combination of here and a studio. At the very least, I have the opportunity to work out songs long before the studio, something I have NEVER had the luxury of doing. I’ve never had a chance to really think about the components of a full song, simply because I couldn’t make those other sounds.
It requires a rethinking of ideas. Originally my ideas for the next CD would have involved a large sound, an almost seventies stadium Les Paul crunch. But now that I’m considering the option of being able to pull these songs apart myself and see what works and what doesn’t, to try and build with my own limited knowledge, that idea doesn’t work. If I grant myself one skill in graphic design, it’s an ability to get a lot of a very limited skill set. I have a good eye for design, but I think I only use about forty percent, at most, of what these programs are actually capable of, simply because I don’t even know about the rest. But what I can do with that forty percent is pretty strong, I think, because I have a feel for it otherwise. I’m hoping that recording is like that, too, that using ProTools will be like that. That, though I may not fully comprehend the medium, or the tool, I have the ability to write a good song, and so based around that what I can achieve with a very limited ability with the tool is enhanced.
That seems to say to me, though, that the output will be a little more spacious, a little more… well, experimental is too impressive a word, but maybe more… figurative. Less Sloan and more Beulah.
Man, for someone who hasn’t even started or spent day one with a home studio setup, I do go on. Hey, look, it’s all bullshit right now. But it’s something that is pulling at me, and I can’t wait to finally get it set up (well, purchased, first) and try to play around with this stuff. And I’ve never had that feeling before about home recording.