Rainhat – the band

A couple of updates

I spent the last week or so re-recording some parts of the songs that I recorded before, I wasn’t quite happy with how they sounded. A little guitar part here was a bit out of time with the rest, a little vocal part there was out of tune, just these little things here and there that bothered me enough to make me want to do something about it. So I started re-doing them. And while I was doing this, I noticed something. The more I listened to the songs, the more things I noticed that bothered me. The guitar is a bit out of tune, the bass is not very even rhythmically, my voice sounds bad, all these things just started sticking out as I listened to them. So in the end I just re-recorded two whole songs, every part of them, from scratch.

Now, I started out recording the songs in the living room, but since it was hard to get the house to myself and get a quiet moment to record, I carried all the gear down into the basement and started recording there instead. The acoustics are quite different, and I started using different kinds of headphones as well to reduce the amount of sound bleeding through the headphones into the microphones when I was recording. All these things probably made a difference, but I think most of all, I’m just being picky. I get the impression that I could probably keep re-recording these songs for the rest of the year without ever being completely happy with them. I’m not the greatest singer in the world, and I’m definitely not the greatest guitar player in the world, so I guess the flaws I spot in my own playing and singing bother me because I know I could do it better, given enough time to improve my singing and playing. But when is it good enough? I could keep taking guitar lessons for a decade, and while I would definitely improve, would I ever be “done” with it? No, I think not. It’s a hard thing to do, to just call it good enough and leave it at that, but I think I’m going to.

I finished re-recording two songs, Falling out of love, and Desert City, and I’m going to re-record at least parts of two more, but after that I’m going to call it good. I need to finish this collection sometime. It’s not going to be the perfect album, and I never expected it to be, but I think it’s going to be good enough for a first album.

The next album is going to be better, and I’m going to improve a few things for it. That’s part of the challenge in being a musician, I guess. To never stagnate and to always keep improving and evolving.