In fact I have several; one for each planable part of my work. This is necessary for me to organise the tasks, their order and priorities and how long they take. Particularly since I have to fit these tasks around my day job and other chores and with whatever energies I have left at my disposal. So I have a plan for the remaining activities for the next record, Uneasy Listening; I have a plan for the things I need to do to get back on the road; and I have a plan for promotional stuff. And most importantly, and to begin with, I had a plan for writing the plans. I’m presently planning to prepare a plan for overhauling my website.

I like plans. I do them whenever I have a brilliant new idea or feel a fresh rush of enthusiasm. I’m particularly partial to planning things at New Year. Preparing plans helps me avoid having to actually do things.

        

I took to the epithet “Independent Musician” with gusto. I like the rank of “Weekend Warrior” less. Still, if the cap fits…

Each term can have a slight air of the derogatory about it, depending on context, and both are used with a perceptible virtual sneer by some professionals - particularly in online engineering and production circles. I care not a whit. We independent musos and weekend warriors do what we can and what we must - sometimes with grim determination, admittedly - but the rewards can be sweeter because they are won without the aid of corporate marketing machinery (chicanery?) and we can be forgiven for preceiving them as ours through merit alone.

It’s not as if full-time signed artists and bands are flooding the record stores and iTunes with great music and our independent status alone is no criterion for making judgements on the quality of ours. Admittedly, our lesser experience in areas of production, packaging and marketing, coupled with, very often, limited budgets can combine to make it very difficult for us to achieve the sheer commercial professionalism of the major record labels and their ilk. But our homespun efforts will, more often than not, compete musically with the big guns for all that. Certainly, I admire more of the music of my independent peers than what comes into earshot from the TV and radio.

Would I sign up with a major? See my earlier ramblings on day jobs.

        

The bulk of the songs for Uneasy Listening is sitting on the hard-drive of my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation or Discount Analogue Workaround, depending on age and prejudice) awaiting editing. What does this comprise?

Well, as far as the guitar parts are concerned, it involves editing out the occasional (I insist) fluffs from the selected take using corresponding bits from alternate takes. This can be a painstaking episode auditioning the selected take closely to identify the aforesaid fluffs, performing the edit on the computer screen by incorporating and cross-fading bits chopped out of other files and incorporating them into the selected one, then listening closely to the results to make sure the edit is seamless.

For the vocal track it involves “comping” from four or five takes. For the uninitiated, this involves selecting the best lines, phrases, words, or even parts of words from these takes and gluing them together in a new master version of the vocal track. With a little imagination you should be able to see that this can be a mind-numbing venture.

In fact, both of these activities are the least creative part of the process of putting an album together and can leave you spiritually drained. You are, after all, listening out for the bad bits. And, to be honest, some bits can indeed be hair-raisingly bad. There is also a danger that, after spending a couple of hours with headphones on staring at the screen, your faculty for making accurate judgments can become blunted at which time it’s best to shut the DAW down and come back to it the next day.

So why don’t I just record the song as I would perform it; ie, guitar and vocal all at once straight into the mics and into the DAW? Well, there are a few reasons:

1. I don’t have the mics to do this effectively
2. This is hard (to my mind, impracticable) without an engineer to help with mic placement, and get an optimum balance between them at the console.
3. The sonics of the studio are not optimum for this method.
4. I would only feel comfortable recording this way (think take after take) when the house is empty, which is rare.
5. Working the way I do enables me to apply EQ, compression, and reverb (sparingly in each case) to the guitar and vocal separately, allowing greatest flexibility.

I would not hesitate to record the songs as performed in a commercial studio with an engineer to hand, but that is not the case. I’m happy with the way I work and I’m concerned only in achieving results that are sonically pleasing to the customers of my records. And I mean by that obtaining a quality of production that doesn’t get in the way of the songs. Or to put it simply: to achieve transparency.

But there it is. I have a pleasant few days mucking around with .wav files and their raggedy representations on my computer screen. I’m just glad I recently invested in a new computer graphics card so I can see the fluffs and bum notes in their digitally crystal clear, accurately colour-balanced glory.

        

…when I was in Italy have not done my chops any good. Indeed, picking up my (new) guitar again after returning made me wonder at how easily and quickly technique can fall off. I recall reading somewhere that Segovia opined that technique never stands still; it either improves or deteriorates. I dunno, I normally do a lot of practicing just to keep mine where it is… Anyway, I believe it was Segovia who took guitar neck shaped plank of wood with him so he could exercise his fingers when he was in the trenches during some war, or other (Spanish civil?). I missed my guitar when in Italy and looked forward to playing it again, but when it was actually on my lap I couldn’t really get engaged with it. The guitar sounded great, of course, but I could only pick at it in a rather half-hearted fashion. At the time, I put it down to tiredness. After a minute or two I put the guitar down and went off to get some sleep. I felt a little uneasy, though, since I had assumed that all my creative juices had been building up just waiting to be released in a torrent of wild picking and couldn’t entirely figure out why it didn’t. The possibility that there were no creative juiced to torrent, I summarily dismissed out of hand as being absurd. Surely.

Anyway, the day following these desultory efforts, I resolved to open one of the bottles of Chianti we had brought back from our vacation and sip a few glasses while just noodling to try and reignite the spark. I also decided to change the strings (which incidentally would be this guitar’s first string change). The renewed growl and sparkle this lent the guitar caused a little thrill to run up the spine, for sure, and caused me to turn it around in my hands and admire it again as an object. This guitar is a splendid thing to behold. Then, I spent the next few hours sipping away and working out the middle bit to the song whose lyrics I’d done while on vacation. I think I got somewhere with this but I realised I would have to belt out a few songs for real to get back into the swing of things. Maybe this weekend…