Hello,
It’s so annoying that when you’re trying to come up with stuff you never come up with anything good, and when you’re half-asleep humming to yourself in the middle of the night you come up with something amazing and you have to wake yourself up enough to remember it and write it down.
Such is the case with an interesting chord progression I came up with for the bridge and another for the outro of Happy Riff Song. I’m still having quite a hard time coming up with lyrics, I’m afraid it’ll sound too teenage-poetry-y. But the chord progression sounds pretty cool. The end of the song will just be the same melody as the chorus, maybe the same lyrics, but sung against this new chord progression. It’ll be cool. I just need to get to recording it, and last week was crazy, this week is crazier, and although I had a day off, I was waiting for something to arrive in the mail (keep reading) so that I could test it out and stuff. Besides, it’s a day off for a reason, and although it’s fun to do, recording this stuff is work.
So what arrived was a condenser microphone, a Røde NT1-A to be precise, that I had ordered to replace my O.K. dynamic mic to use for recording. It sounds wonderful, and it’ll be nice to record my amp with it, as well as acoustic guitar, and drums (sort of). But that’ll be cool, my vocals will sound a lot more nice and clear. The only thing I’m worried about is that the room that my studio is in is terrible reverb-wise; things echo like a… I dunno, something really bouncy and energetic. I may need to breakout the thumbtacks and funky wool stuff or whatever it is that you get at the craft store to make a little vocal booth of some sort.
In other news, I’ve been satisfying my electronics interest by looking at modular, analog, control-voltage synthesis. It’s quite interesting, and would be a great (if somewhat expensive) thing to start, because it would be pretty fun to make but would yield something that I could make music with. I already know that pre-built modules are pretty expensive, but as far as I can tell it’s cheaper to build your own if you make your own PCBs, buy components individually, etc. Besides, I have a local electronics store that I’m almost certain would have everything that I need besides fancy potentiometers and other music-centric components. I’ve found a few cool sites that have diagrams and schematics and such, like the “Bergfotron” or the “Synthesizer DIY pages”. But yeah, I’d get started by making a VCO of some sort and then figuring out how to give it notes (i.e, a CV keyboard, a midi-to-CV interface or software Audio Unit), and then test it using oscilloscope freeware that I found. From there, I’d build maybe a VCA and an EG and so on and so forth, and it would be awesome.
Forever Endeavor,
Walker
