I’m very excited about this. I’ve been spending the last little while recording, using my Mac and GarageBand to try and get sounds running. For this album I’m trying as hard as possible to limit myself to really simple stuff: vocals, percussion, and a piano, because a piano’s the only instrument I own where making a note is as simple as hitting a key along the scale. I’m putting it all together in GarageBand because it’s simple and I don’t know what I’m doing. My hope is that the sounds in my head are beautiful enough that I won’t have to resort to weird tricks to making them, that if I tinker enough I can get it working right.
When I finally record I’ll be using the family studio equipment, but until then I’m using my Mac microphone, and I’m trying to emit the best sound I can despite that. The sounds I like I’m saving and using later with the crisper recordings.
This is a sampling of my playing a line on the piano, very poorly. (I don’t know if this is a line that will appear in the CD.) It’s played with four different renderings, then a fifth time of all four playing together.
The first rendering is my favorite one, because it sounds good and not very much like a piano. That’s the one that excited me. The second one is the original, unedited sound, the third one is tinny with bass removal, and the fourth is my current, unfinished attempt to get a very rich, clean sound from my original recording.
