New Album - Blog #1

So I've had a full album worked out in my head for several years now. I've made changes along the way, but the basic structure has always held. I designed the cover art ages ago, and all the songs are written and arranged. I've even released a couple of those songs as singles.

But I haven't actually finished the fucking album. There are some songs that the only proof they exist is that I wrote down the lyrics on a piece of paper. I want to actually finish and release this album, because I think it contains some of my best work - and other than a couple of people hearing me practice parts no one knows it.

But I need to force myself to work on it to get it done. I've had real issues getting projects finished as of late. So I've decided to blog about it. I figure if I blog every day, separate from the Radio Free California and Cheap Shots posts, separate about my occasional rants and separate from everything else going on in my life, I can show real progress and finally get this done.

And maybe release a few singles that I've written that are separate from everything else I've done.

So the plan is to blog every day, and to show you the work I've done - new work - every day. Very little of this will be audio samples, but instead will be screenshots of things I've done that day. Most of that won't make any sense to most of you, but I need to show you what I've done.

When working on these projects I often sketch out the parts and try to figure out how to perform them. Drums are the hardest and are generally the first thing I have to conquer. The real issue is that I need to express what I want done to a real drummer so that they can record the part. I might put down demo tracks or a reference track using a drum machine but there are some things my old drum machine just can't do. One of those things is a drum roll.

The last track on the album will be a song called "Heart", and it alternates time signatures between a standard 4/4 time and 7/4 time, with the outro of the song in 7/4. I want to have the drums switch to a military snare type of sound, with a specific rhythm. That's what's represented in the picture above, which is made up of samples.

The band Scary Pockets put out a selection of samples for people to use, which includes some very nice drum sounds. The top line you see up there are edits I've made to a long snare sound performed by drummer Lemar Carter. The other three lines are snare hits, from the same group of samples of Lemar Carter.

Using those two different samples I put together a rough idea of what I'm after for the military drum sound for the end of the song. I put that together today and sent it off to Kyousuke. We'll talk next week about it (he lives in Japan and Japan has had a rough couple of days) on a conference call and start to sketch out how we're going to work out the drums.

So that's my day today. It's not much, but hey - it's only the first day and I promise you that it's not nothing. I'm a firm believer that an album needs to have a flow to it, and the ending needs to satisfy and it also needs to leave you holding your breath without realizing it - when the music stops you finally exhale.

How an album ends matters.

Talk to you tomorrow!