On The Lake Beneath The Shoreline – 220211

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Difficult day today.

There are three areas of the track where guitar solos are suggested. I was working my way slowly through these and got a half-decent (for me) set of parts down for the first section. I was starting the second section when I lost all sound from the Strat. All sound, that is, other than fearful buzzing and screaming feedback. I was dreading that there might be something wrong with the electrics on the Strat, but after much time and trail-and-error, I found that the lead from the Strat to the Pod 2.0 was knackered. I was able to plug the Strat directly into the Tascam 2488 using the lead out from the Pod, which proved that the Strat was OK. This unfortunately brought my recording session to a premature end…

…and probably no harm too. I had just about reached the limits of my inability with the first solo section. Two further sections would’ve seen me running out of ideas (and fingertips) bigtime.

So what I’m going to do is use the parts I’d recorded for the first solo as a second solo, and then program keyboards solos for the first and third sections. There’s always a workaround.

I’m really getting the sense that I’m working on The Track That Doesn’t Want To Be Recorded. There’s usually at least one per album, and it may well be an indication of the track’s eventual fate. We’ll see…

Regards,

djp

More another session

Peter Fitzpatrick decided to do a tighter version of the song we’re working on in memory of Paul Culnane, so I spent a few hours last night recording new parts on the 4003.

The original version of the song was based on guitars, while the new version is based on a lovely electric piano tone. This new tone suggested some changes to the bass line I’d already recorded – it’s more restrained than the original bass line, which is probably no bad thing.

This afternoon, I cleaned up the various bass wavs in Cool Edit Pro and comp’d together a bass line which sounds pretty good to me. Some editing issues, but Peter’s a good engineer so I’ve no doubt that he’ll do an excellent job on this, as always.

I’ll be popping into Peter’s studio in Dublin on Saturday to (try and) do some backing vocals. Should be fun!

Regards,

djp