Week 16, Over Time

Merry Christmas to those that celebrate and Happy New Year everyone! Youtube link for iPhone

I hope everyone has had a great holiday season. I’ve had a fantastic Christmas today with my amazing wife, who got me a Melodica, so expect to hear some serious Melodica-based tracks in the coming weeks. My kid had a blast and is completely overwhelmed by everything for better (sitting at his mini drum kit rocking out) and worse (total epic meltdown on Christmas eve at a Chinese restaurant with friends). 2009 has been an awesome year and this project has been a really great part of it. I didn’t see it coming. I’ve really enjoyed the challenge and connecting with people all over the world, and I can’t wait to see how things go down in 2010. I’m not sure if I’ll have a track done before the New Year or not, it depends on how things pan out next week.

One thing that’s coming up early next year is the digital release of Project 52,Volume 1. Everything is in place. I did a little mastering of the the first 13 tracks, uploaded the high quality mp3s, and now I’m just waiting for the album to go live. You’ll notice in the upper right-hand corner of the site that there’s a widget where you can listen to the remastered album, front to back, and eventually you’ll be able to pick up individual tracks or the entire album at iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon, and other stores online.

“Over Time” is another rock track that’s somewhat obviously influenced by Guided by Voices. At least that’s what I thought when I was writing it, but once it was done, I realized that there are also some serious shades of Nirvana. It makes sense because the other night I was completely sucked into a documentary about the making of the album Nevermind. I can’t help it. I was a grunge kid through and through. I still remember when my friend Todd came over to my house, frantically slapped a cassette into the tape deck, and started raving about this band he’d recorded off the local college radio station when someone had played the entire album over the air. It absolutely kicked my ass. It was unlike anything that we’d heard in our smallish town. That album was Bleach.

The song is pretty basic: guitar, bass, and drums. The guitars were recorded with MultiTrack on my iPhone using the custom break out cable. I also took two vocal tracks with the iPhone mic in Multitrack, but for the first time I wasn’t able to get the type of sound that I wanted for the vocals. I was prepared to make the most of them, but since I had extra time on Wednesday after finishing up the last two tracks for the video game my partner Dave and I have been working on, and getting a good drum take for the song, and since the Rode NTK was already set up, I re-recorded the vocals with the tube mic. I kept both recordings in for the last part of the song, so it wasn’t a complete loss. The bass track was through my Fender Twin and recorded with the Rode. As usual, the tracks were recorded and mixed in Reaper.

2 Comments to Week 16, Over Time

Ben
December 25, 2009

Great track. I’ve really been enjoying your work. Multitrack and iPhone make recording fun again

Have you found a good way to publish to iTunes/Amazon/Rhapsody/eMusic all at once? Or do you do each separately?

project52
December 25, 2009

Thanks Ben! No doubt about MultiTrack. I can’t wait to check out the updated version – should be out any day now.

Leave a comment