Thanks! I will definitely not complain about that comparison.

Star Wars

The Music Man?

Well, I suppose we can see how things go. It is nice to have a safety valve in case I am hit by a meteor between now and November 1.

By the way, I would love to see how the music for this song was tracked. How many different synth sounds are overlaid with each other? And what is that mysterious chomping sound at the end? It sounds like you are using the accordion without pushing any of the keys.

Sorry for the delay, my friend! It turns out, my brain is really programmed to work on one song a month, no more and no less.

I started by asking myself, if thenewgreen finished this song by himself, what would he be LEAST likely to do with it? The answer I came up with, and thus the direction I took this, was a rhyme-centered nonsense patter song. But the rich dreamy stoner vibe is so strong in this one, I didn't want to mess with that. I will hold off on mastering it in case you want to add more. Thanks again for this delightful opportunity!

http://hardtaco.org/media/mp3/Hard_Taco_Radio/So_SoUnmastered.mp3

"So So"

Jason Alexander and Duran Duran are chasing Melisandre and her random band of pandas till they hand her in, and the tongue they chat or prattle or banter in isn’t Hmong because the random band of pandas are Mandarin

It’ll be so so nice

It’ll be so so nice

Santa Ana, can a man of temperamental candor pen a feminine dilemma with a gentleman of gentle manner, put a salmon in enamel and examine it and a sentimental panorama laminate

It’ll be so so nice

Little me in little Italy

It’ll be so so nice

It’ll be so so

Noncommittally, it’ll be so so

It’ll be so so nice

It’ll be so so nice

Had her in a kennel had her in a kennel had her had her had her in a kennel had her in a kennel had her had her…

It’ll be so so

It’ll be so so nice

It’ll be so so nice

Wow, thank you so much!

Let's talk DAWs. I have used Logic for the last 10+ years, and I love it for almost everything. I wasn't always a Mac-ophile, but I'm in pretty deep now.

The great:

Logic is built for composing and editing. It's so much fun to audition different sound effects on a recorded track quickly and non-destructively. I love the flexible programmable percussion. that makes you feel like you actually were part of the creative process and didn't just steal a loop. The built-in patches for guitars are good enough that I haven't recorded an electric guitar through a real amp since, basically forever. The interface for recording multiple takes and taking the perfect clips from each one is simply divine.

The pretty good:

Logic has built in pitch correction, which I happily admit to using (fight me), but it is very time consuming to do it right. You can't just set the key and turn it on or off... you have to edit each note individually or it will either be wrong or add cracks and pops. Sometimes, it decides that two notes are actually a single note, and won't let you correct them individually.

To record lead vocals on a song that I care about, I usually spend about 20 minutes recording 5-6 takes, 60 minutes picking the best take for each phrase (or word). and another 60 minutes playing with the pitch correction. If there are harmonies, multiply all that by the number of tracks. Sounds awful, I know, but it's very Zen.

The not so good:

Mastering. I used to have a PC, and used SONAR as the DAW, I had a hacked copy of a mastering program called T-Racks that was just glorious and idiot-proof. The built in mastering algorithms on Logic just don't sound right to me, and I'm not smart enough to figure out why. My solution? I've hired a guy named Michael on Fiverr.com to master my songs. It's $7/song, and he gets them back to me within 24 hours. I'm sure he doesn't actually listen to the songs. he probably just plugs everything into T-Racks!

And that, thenewgreen, is my excuse for only doing one song a month. More would be simply too expensive.

Challenge accepted! I listened to it a few times in the car this week and I’m psyched, stoked, and juiced up. (Maybe even keyed up.)