Holdup

I’ve had the new studio set up for a couple of weeks now. The boomy reverb is still a big problem.
The bed tracks for the new album have been started. I’m programming the MIDI drums, and laying down a temporarly bassline that will guide the song. There’s really not much else that I can do until I put up some sound-diffusing foam on the walls. That will probably be a month or two. An agonizing month or two – I want to get back to work on this batch of songs, I’m REALLY excited about them. So excited that, this morning while listening to the Your Loving Song demo on my MP3 player, my eyes started watering. It was all I could do not to stop on Queen St, pose a rockstar pose, and start singing and air-guitaring! I’m seriously loving this project, and can’t wait to build it and show it off!

There is an upside to this delay. I’m my own boss, there is no record company pushing for a release date and I don’t need the sales profits yet (I can still buy my own beer this summer). So there’s nothing but my own lack of patience to push the release. My plan is to rehearse the songs over and over and over. Play the guitars and keyboards against the bed tracks, sing karaoke-style with them.
This “pre-production” should help improve the songs in more subtle ways. Maybe a kick drum will seem out of place and I can fix it, maybe I'll discover that something should change after the first verse… I’ve already decided to chop a measure from the middle of Little Rose Tattoo and add screaming background vocals behind the guitar solo (yes there are a couple of those on this record) in a song currently being called You’re A Star but might get changed to When You Are Gone or something completely different. With time, I can keep workshopping these new songs.

So yes, there’s a delay. And yes, it’s pissing me off. But there’s a positive side to it, and I’m going to exploit that to the best of my ability.