Week 38, Rooftop Lives

The 38th song is a change-up. I hope you enjoy it. I’m writing from the wooded serenity of my in-laws’ house outside of Philadelphia. It’s Memorial Day weekend and that means an annual family trip down the PA Turnpike to my wife’s childhood home. The last time that I was here was week 13, for those of you keeping track. Unlike the 13th song, “These Days,” this song wasn’t recorded here and doesn’t feature my wife’s childhood Fisher Price xylophone or my father in-law’s amp. But it was mixed here; plus I mixed in a last minute but valuable addition to the song while I was out here.

The day before our trip, after getting off the bus, I was fooling around with my iPhone and listening to this song’s mix while I was walking down my street. For no good reason, I turned on the record-monitor button, which let me listen through the iPhone’s mic as I was walking. I was intrigued with how the everyday sounds of my street – birds, cars, people – mixed into the song, and I was just about a minute into recording some of it when the skies opened up and one of those summertime downpours came screaming out of nowhere. It was all that I could do to get my phone in my pocket before it got soaked (the outside of my pockets didn’t fair as well, along with the rest of me). I was frustrated by not getting a full track of street-sounds, but I pulled together a final mix for the song the night before the trip and resigned myself to shelve that little bit of ambiance for a future track. But as I fell asleep that night I came up with a plan for the morning: I made sure that I got myself all ready to go and set out to pack the car, my paternal duty, like a madman. This  left just enough time for me to set up with the Alesis ProTrack and use the built-in field recording mics to track a few minutes of birds and cars and other street noises in stereo from my front porch. I remixed the track with a little more care, and now I’m feeling pretty good about how it turned out.

I’ve had the bass and guitar parts for this song finished for a couple of weeks, which was before my ProTrack arrived in the mail, so the guitars and bass were recorded onto the iPhone using the old break-out cable. This song was actually written on the bass and the guitar was added afterwords. This is the second song that I’ve ever written on bass. The first one was “Undefined”, from week 29. I think they both have a distinctly different flavor from the guitar-first songs. The drums on this one were recorded in the same fashion as the last number of songs, but I plan on auditioning the ProTrack next week. I’m going to spare you the redundant details of the drum recording as I’m trying not to take too much time-off from the family. As always, my faithful tools are the iPhone, the MultiTrack recording app, and Reaper, with honorable mention to my laptop for letting me take the show on the road.

Have a great holiday everyone, and I’ll see you next week for the completion of the third quarter of songs. In the mean time, enjoy three new additions to the free downloads page.

2 Comments to Week 38, Rooftop Lives

DaveB
June 5, 2010

always a fan of the ballads!

Albert Kinng
June 6, 2010

Hi, you named it “Project 52″ I didn’t give it a name… but I just wanted to share with you that I’m doing a new song every week since 2000 for a Radio Station. I do production and parody as well as imaging and one day I was thinking Do anyone else do this kind of job or I’m the only one with this weird job of creating a brand new song every week??? I was glad to found your blog! honestly!

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