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When you set out to record a thing, you want it to be perfect. Or, at least, I do. I want every chord to ring out pure and clear, and all the words right (despite being dyslexic), and the notes to be on pitch. I want the additional instruments, percussion, and so on to be just right too.
It seems reasonable to want perfection. But perfection is rarely (if ever) attainable. And I don't have forever to make recordings of my songs available to people. While my health is stable, I've had chronic illness forever (or at least since puberty) and my brother--my younger brother--dying earlier this year reminded me that we are all mortal, and though we don't know the number, we know our days are not infinite.
So I am committed to recording things as well as I can in the short term, rather than spending months or years polishing them and perhaps never memorializing them for people to hear. Whether or not it will make a difference to anyone else, it makes a difference to me when I do, finally, accomplish that.
And so, late last month, with Bandcamp Friday looming, I sat down to work on recording at least a few more songs.
As usual, I was running behind where I wanted to be on the project. I'd come down with bronchitis, and that slowed me down a lot, and the stupid corn allergy delayed getting antibiotics besides. It was way too close to the deadline when I again had energy and focus for recording, just barely. And then I developed a sore throat, which was Just Not Fair.
But I sat down, tuned instruments, picked a song, and started. I first worked on Magic Comes From Within, and recorded the main tongue drum part. My focus wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I kept making mistakes, and so I kept doing it over again, until I got a take that was mostly good. Then instead of pushing myself to try to achieve perfection, I did some editing in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to get a track that I was happy to sing to.
Next I sang, and recorded that again several times too, before I was reasonably happy with it.
After that, I'd planned to add chimes, but in the moment decided to play with the tongue drum some more instead--I'd gotten headachy too, and the chimes sounded jangly and harsh in the moment, instead of tinkly and lovely. Happily, that worked (and without lots of mistakes and re-recording, to my surprise).
I finally added bass, not much, nothing difficult, since there was no time to compose and practice something fancy, and I certainly didn't have the focus to improvise something fancy! But the very simple bass part, added to what I had already, made the song feel finished to me, and the whole made me smile.
The other tracks had similar issues. The headache and sore throat continued, so my focus wasn't great. I made a lot more mistakes than I usually do, on instruments, words, and vocals. I re-recorded tracks a lot, simplified some of the things I'd planned, improvised a little, and practiced my limited audio editing skills rather more than I had thought I'd need to.
And I listened, over and over, tweaking the settings, finding spots that needed editing or re-recording, and doing that work, before listening again.
And then I called my partner to be my beta-listener, and got feedback. so I could edit some more and listen some more, before calling her back to listen to the improved version.
Eventually, I had seven songs recorded. I listened again. I didn't like how my voice sounded on two of them--it sounded rough. Should I redo those tracks? My beta-listener said absolutely not, they sounded good. When pressed, she added that she thought the roughness added to the emotion in those songs.
And I remembered listening to a piece on NPR where they played a snippet of an untrained young woman singing, with no correction. To my ear, her voice was pleasant, though the pitch imperfections were definitely noticeable. Then they played the same snippet after thorough pitch correction, and it was no longer pleasant. To me, it sounded as if the life and joy had been sucked out of it.
I decided to call those recordings "good enough", and finished up checking to make sure all the details were entered on the Bandcamp site (tags, cover art, lyrics, the about-the-song bits, the recordings--though I'm sure Bandcamp wouldn't have let me post without the recordings--and the credits), took a deep breath and clicked the button to publish the album.
And then I stayed up a bit to post about the album, since it was already Bandcamp Friday, and I would get more of the sales price if people bought it that day, so they had to have a chance to know it existed that same day.
Could I have made better recordings with more time? Possibly. Could I have done better without the bronchitis, sore throat, and headache? Probably. And maybe I'll re-record those songs a different time, or maybe I won't, but they exist out there now, for people to listen to, and that is very satisfying.
I did the thing. And that matters.
This is the first cover art I made for the album. There are a lot of things I like about it, but looking at it onscreen, in the tiny thumbnail-size that is displayed on Bandcamp, I decided that it was too hard to read the title, and so I made another one using a different picture I took the morning of May Day. (And we won't talk about the other cover art I made where I typoed a whole word, and wrote Magick In My Mind instead of the proper title...)
It matters, I think (and I've been told), to make the title and author readable even in a thumbnail-sized image of the cover.
As with the recordings, given more time and more health, I probably could have made better cover art, both for the album as a whole and for the individual songs. I'd had plans to do some painting for at least a couple of the songs; that didn't happen. By Thursday morning, I knew there was no way for it to happen; I wasn't even sure yet how many songs I would be able to finish. (I managed 7 of the 8 that were on the top of my list for this album, but it was only a few days earlier that I'd been thinking that at least I had 3.)
So, after delivering a friend home safely from a medical procedure, I took time to stop a few times on the way home to take pictures. It made sense to me to use photos taken on May Day for an album of magickal songs anyway.
It seems reasonable to want perfection. But perfection is rarely (if ever) attainable. And I don't have forever to make recordings of my songs available to people. While my health is stable, I've had chronic illness forever (or at least since puberty) and my brother--my younger brother--dying earlier this year reminded me that we are all mortal, and though we don't know the number, we know our days are not infinite.
So I am committed to recording things as well as I can in the short term, rather than spending months or years polishing them and perhaps never memorializing them for people to hear. Whether or not it will make a difference to anyone else, it makes a difference to me when I do, finally, accomplish that.
And so, late last month, with Bandcamp Friday looming, I sat down to work on recording at least a few more songs.
As usual, I was running behind where I wanted to be on the project. I'd come down with bronchitis, and that slowed me down a lot, and the stupid corn allergy delayed getting antibiotics besides. It was way too close to the deadline when I again had energy and focus for recording, just barely. And then I developed a sore throat, which was Just Not Fair.
But I sat down, tuned instruments, picked a song, and started. I first worked on Magic Comes From Within, and recorded the main tongue drum part. My focus wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I kept making mistakes, and so I kept doing it over again, until I got a take that was mostly good. Then instead of pushing myself to try to achieve perfection, I did some editing in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to get a track that I was happy to sing to.
Next I sang, and recorded that again several times too, before I was reasonably happy with it.
After that, I'd planned to add chimes, but in the moment decided to play with the tongue drum some more instead--I'd gotten headachy too, and the chimes sounded jangly and harsh in the moment, instead of tinkly and lovely. Happily, that worked (and without lots of mistakes and re-recording, to my surprise).
I finally added bass, not much, nothing difficult, since there was no time to compose and practice something fancy, and I certainly didn't have the focus to improvise something fancy! But the very simple bass part, added to what I had already, made the song feel finished to me, and the whole made me smile.
The other tracks had similar issues. The headache and sore throat continued, so my focus wasn't great. I made a lot more mistakes than I usually do, on instruments, words, and vocals. I re-recorded tracks a lot, simplified some of the things I'd planned, improvised a little, and practiced my limited audio editing skills rather more than I had thought I'd need to.
And I listened, over and over, tweaking the settings, finding spots that needed editing or re-recording, and doing that work, before listening again.
And then I called my partner to be my beta-listener, and got feedback. so I could edit some more and listen some more, before calling her back to listen to the improved version.
Eventually, I had seven songs recorded. I listened again. I didn't like how my voice sounded on two of them--it sounded rough. Should I redo those tracks? My beta-listener said absolutely not, they sounded good. When pressed, she added that she thought the roughness added to the emotion in those songs.
And I remembered listening to a piece on NPR where they played a snippet of an untrained young woman singing, with no correction. To my ear, her voice was pleasant, though the pitch imperfections were definitely noticeable. Then they played the same snippet after thorough pitch correction, and it was no longer pleasant. To me, it sounded as if the life and joy had been sucked out of it.
I decided to call those recordings "good enough", and finished up checking to make sure all the details were entered on the Bandcamp site (tags, cover art, lyrics, the about-the-song bits, the recordings--though I'm sure Bandcamp wouldn't have let me post without the recordings--and the credits), took a deep breath and clicked the button to publish the album.
And then I stayed up a bit to post about the album, since it was already Bandcamp Friday, and I would get more of the sales price if people bought it that day, so they had to have a chance to know it existed that same day.
Could I have made better recordings with more time? Possibly. Could I have done better without the bronchitis, sore throat, and headache? Probably. And maybe I'll re-record those songs a different time, or maybe I won't, but they exist out there now, for people to listen to, and that is very satisfying.
I did the thing. And that matters.
This is the first cover art I made for the album. There are a lot of things I like about it, but looking at it onscreen, in the tiny thumbnail-size that is displayed on Bandcamp, I decided that it was too hard to read the title, and so I made another one using a different picture I took the morning of May Day. (And we won't talk about the other cover art I made where I typoed a whole word, and wrote Magick In My Mind instead of the proper title...)
It matters, I think (and I've been told), to make the title and author readable even in a thumbnail-sized image of the cover.
As with the recordings, given more time and more health, I probably could have made better cover art, both for the album as a whole and for the individual songs. I'd had plans to do some painting for at least a couple of the songs; that didn't happen. By Thursday morning, I knew there was no way for it to happen; I wasn't even sure yet how many songs I would be able to finish. (I managed 7 of the 8 that were on the top of my list for this album, but it was only a few days earlier that I'd been thinking that at least I had 3.)
So, after delivering a friend home safely from a medical procedure, I took time to stop a few times on the way home to take pictures. It made sense to me to use photos taken on May Day for an album of magickal songs anyway.
