Past Weekend

I did a bunch of recording over the past weekend, mostly vocals. The house is currently empty but for me (the rest of the folks are on vacation) which made it a good time to get things done. Once or twice, the ring of a phone a couple of rooms away was faintly audible, but it was never in a take I really wanted to keep in the first place, so no harm done.

There are times when I wait for inspiration to strike before getting into the studio; more often, when I don't get into the studio it's because I've had a long day at work and don't feel motivated about anything, rather than lacking creative inspiration specifically. I mention it because one thing I keep learning is this: the work itself constitutes one form of "inspiration." There's a pretty clear pattern in which working tirelessly on a vocal track for Song X or Song Y, or a guitar track for Song Z, eventually bogs down, and suddenly the creative juices *demand* [with appropriate foot-stomping] to be let loose on something else. Quite often, the resulting noodles or experiments wind up being the nucleus of the next song. Sometimes, those are the songs that come together the quickest and fastest .... and sometimes songs written quick and fast turn out to be the best ones, as well.

There's an obvious risk to allowing oneself the freedom to go off-task in that way: one might find oneself continually distracted by the latest shiny, new chord progression or melodic/lyric fragment, and never really finish any of them. I suppose I court that risk: I have a *lot* of unfinished songs, many of which were the Obsession du Jour a few months or a few weeks ago. The purpose of getting into the studio this past weekend, with the family away, was to get closer to finishing a few of them (although "finishing," when one is an amateur producer/engineer, is akin to Zeno's Paradox: six months from now, my best efforts to date will probably sound "unfinished" to me. but that's okay)

Since I was getting quite a bit done--having planned ahead and made a LIST of songs I intended to work on, and then marching through those songs in an orderly fashion, laying down better guide vocals and/or takes I intend to keep, consistently through the weekend--I let myself go a few times.

Not surprisingly, I have a new "favorite song I'm working on."

The best thing is that it's in 3/4, and while working on it I think I've figured out another song (the new favorite from two weeks ago) whose timing was confusing me.

Meanwhile the vocals I did over the weekend are decent, by and large. I have some production decisions to make before declaring the songs "finished," but I have much more to go on.