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Day Five (Year Four)

Today was great!  I made some major progress toward finishing the second song of my EP today.

According to the schedule I wrote out when all of this began, tonight was supposed to be the night I recorded vocals.  Considering my equipment failures of the last few days, however, I pretty much knew that wasn't going to happen.  Here's what did:

1)  After not being able to get the bass part right the last few days, tonight was the night I nailed it.  Felt really good to finally get that recorded.

2)  With the rhythm section firmly in place, I was confronted with the prospect of two guitar parts.  Ever one for cutting corners (not a good habit, I know, but one that is fading as this project continues), I skipped over the acoustic part and gave the electric a shot.  Well, I got the tone right, and in the process I figured out what the instrumentation needs to be where the guitars are concerned.  The first time through, I hit the electric part with a ton of bricks from the first part of the intro straight through to the end of the last chorus.  It didn't work.  There needs to be an acoustic part for this song.  It'll run all the way through, there's no question about that, but for the intro, the first verse, and possibly the final chorus, the acoustic needs to be the primary instrument.

The second thing I tried worked perfectly.  I brought in the electric at the first chorus, and kept it in through the rest of the song.  I liked it at the end (which is why I'm still up in the air as to whether or not to strip things down to solo acoustic on the last chorus), but I'll tell you what, it really sounds like a song now.  Drums, bass, and the electric where it is leaves a noticeable pocket for the acoustic.  I get that doing that is a trick of the trade that has been used a zillion times, but it doesn't work for every single song, so when it falls in place perfectly, I feel like it's meant to be that way.

So, headed into tomorrow I need to:

1) lay down an acoustic part
2) fix a couple of issues with the electric part at the very end of the song
3) mix the music

That won't get my all the way done (no lyrics yet), but it'll be awesome.

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