Hey, my friends!I'm sitting here having a cup of reheated coffee and feeling a little lethargic from the heat...I finally broke down and put the A/C on a few minutes ago. I guess I shouldn't complain - three or four months from now, that icy wind will be whipping off of Lake Huron as we head into another winter (but we don't want to hear that word just yet, do we?). Lacey (our Yorkie/Lab mix pooch) is laying next to Scott on the couch looking fairly dragged out too...she gets a haircut on Friday and must be burning up with that long fur, poor critter.
Anyway, on to the recording update...
The new song is called "Compass," and it's a little different from what I've been doing for the last two or three years. Whereas a lot of what I've done lately has been more groove-oriented and often danceable, this one is more of a "sit and listen" or "play it in the car" type of song. It harks back, just a bit, to the more progressive path I followed earlier on as a musician. I believe this is the first time I've strayed from 4/4 time since my Realty Show CD (and even there, I only did it for part of one song). Lately, I've kind of been revisiting some of what got me interested in music...listening to the kinds of albums that made me want to do this in the first place...looking at where I started and where I've gone since, thinking about what worked for me and what didn't. I guess it's no surprise that my little personal retrospective found its way into the lyrics on this one, which deal with how easy it can be in life to go off on various side roads and forget where the main road was!
On the more technical side, I'm pretty much over my briefly renewed flirtation with hardware synths and have come to find that software instruments work better for me after all. I've settled into Native Instruments Kontakt 3 as my main "axe" - you can use it as a straight sampler for drum and piano sounds and such, or you can get into some pretty deep sound design too - it covers a lot of sonic ground. I also made an interesting find a few days ago - a software synth called Sylenth that I think gets pretty sweet analog-style sounds. I wasn't expecting to be impressed, having become a little disenchanted with "virtual analogs," but it surprised me. I used it for the bass line on this song and a handful of other sounds too. Actually, all the synth sounds on this song are of the analog variety...I do love those warm, '70s style synthesizer sounds used by guys like Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre, and that's where I went with this one.
Time to quit babbling about the song and the toys used on it and just let you enjoy it, I guess! And it's also time to get off the computer and go climb into bed and try to find a movie to watch (it'll have to be a rerun, we don't have our new batch of Netflix yet). For my readers in the northern latitudes, enjoy the rest of the summer while it's still here. Talk to you soon! :-)
DV
