Irrelevance

Whoa. Long time. Almost an year since my last post. The laziness bug bit me especially when I tripped on the pain staking task of recording and mixing tracks. I have been playing the guitar though, just not enough time to publish music..

A couple of updates.
1) I bought my own looper pedal! Last time I was just experimenting with a friend's and decided its worth the cost to invest in it. It really is a lot of fun. Even if you are a beginner guitarist, and you don't usually like to jam with other musicians mainly because you think you suck (I certainly do), do yourself a favor and buy a looper pedal. Its almost like you have an extra band member jamming with you. FWIW I bought the TC Electronic Ditto looper pedal. Simple, fairly inexpensive and a whole lot of fun.
2) This is the first song I have experimented with a drumming software. Instead of playing a cajon, I wanted to explore more percussion and found the Hydrogen drumming software. Its free and I can download multiple drum machines and program patterns/songs.

The song itself was the product of multiple jamming sessions with my friends here in Boston. I took the guitar with me on a couple of trips with them and we came up with the music. We also worked on lyrics (below). As is evident from the lyrics, it is a fairly dark and brooding song (just the way I like it). The way I see it, the song is about how people are stuck in the 'irrelevant' past, thus the name of the song. The uploaded track is instrumental and we haven't recorded vocals yet. I will update this post if we get there. Song has a lot of looping to feed in different verses below. It hopefully gets interesting around the 2:30 minute mark.

There's a pain in me dear 
In my heart there's a fear 
Nothing's ever clear 
(Even) my shadow's not near 

Life grows in the cold  
My mind is never bold
I can't bear to hold 
But I should never fold

Memories pass by 
Enough to keep me high 
With me (even) when I die 
Sweet baby don't cry

And oh by the way, my solo act is yellowH00d. My friends and I are thinking we should be called 'Straw Hat Invasion Crew'... 

Hopefully I start posting more regularly. Once a month is going to be my target..

don't Turn Back

Happy New Year! Wow 5 months since my last post. To be fair, my guitar was in the shop for at least 2 of those months so that does not count. Now I am back. Last year my new year's resolution was to do a post at least once a month. I am glad that I was able to follow that trend until I broke my guitar.. So I have faith in myself to pursue this further this year as a hobby! And this means I can convince myself to invest a little more (time and money) as the year goes on to experiment more.

This post is all about resolutions! You can even say with some sort of a vindictive feeling to it; to get back at something that you failed to do last year but you promised yourself you would do. If your mind is in that mindset this track will be a good background music for it. I think part of the reason why I am in that mood is because I have been binge watching a lot of 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'The Walking Dead'. Both series has a lot of revenge drama (for some weird reason my sister and I really like this sort of drama) and I have been exposed to a lot of situational sound tracks and background music. So here you go 'don't turn back':

Now some slightly technical rambling:
I also realized that a lot of songs have some sort of looping to it. Either a background riff or percussion, something that keeps going on maintaining the tone of the song. It is impossible for an amateur like me to play the same riff the exact same way twice. So recording, lets say a 3 minute long background riff is 1) Boring 2) Painstaking.

In order to get around this, I used the following brute force way. Played 9 - 18 seconds long clips and then used software to stitch together the track I had in mind. It is literally cut/copy/paste with an extra function called 'mixing' where you can imagine it as if I am pasting a picture on top of a picture to get a 'combined' picture. So in audio, I can paste my guitar on top of percussion track and its called mixing instead of pasting. This was again painful for two reasons. 1) You can hear the minute tempo mistakes due to my laziness and crude audio processing 2) VERY time consuming. So much so that I spent more time working on software compared to playing an instrument. The hell! This is what I do at work. I don't want to be staring at a computer screen to be creating music. So what is the solution?

That is when I came across the looping pedal! Essentially it records stuff real time and I have the ability to record on top of it, overwrite it, start/stop it whenever I want, even connect an aux cable to play external soundtracks so that I can play over it. I borrowed one from a friend and it has a lot of potential to make my recording process easier, more fun and definitely less staring on computer screens. FYI my birthday is in April but I accept early gifts...