From the Home Studio

The challenge this month is to see if I can perfect demos recorded at home so that all that remains for them to be album-ready is mastering at Chimpanzee Studio. Recording at home is less expensive and less stressful and, since my home studio is one half of my kitchen, if ideas come to me, I don't even have to dress properly to get them recorded.

I woke up with a melody in my head on the morning of February 28. In a meeting the next day, I wrote four verses of lyrics based on the melody. I was able to make a preliminary recording of it, which Kei offered some percussion tracks to; but that first stab at a demo was marred by poor timing and a few patchy performances. Moreover, the whole concept of the rhythm section remained vague. All these problems were resolved willy-nilly by the crash of the Garageband software, which has a few well-known bugs. The bug I encountered shuts down the program, with the possibility that one cannot reopen it, when one is looping a section to repeatedly perform a given part. So, if one has a large project at hand, it's best not to record in that manner. It's best to give it one shot, stop the recording, and start again at the beginning of the passage.  So, the first demo project was completely lost, including all its imperfections. All that remained were some of the individual files that I fished out of my hard drive and an MP3 of an earlier version of the project. Not to be discouraged, I started from scratch yesterday and completed a full demo this afternoon. Gone are the timing problems and other imperfections. This is the exact sort of thing I need in order to streamline the recording process.

The song, "DS," started as a simple melody in my head, but the main line was suggested by a comment a friend made. One of my friends said she loves drinking wine and can easily drink half a bottle. Her frank attitude impressed me, especially in light of all the pressures of conformity and self-restraint that Japanese women experience.

After I go through this process of moving a demo through the mastering phase, I will be ready to tackle the demos that Kei and I put down at Chimpanzee last month. I consider this a warming-up or preliminary exercise.