Oct
6
2009
I’m running late in pretty much everything at the moment, and it bugs me. I had planned on being done with recording my collection of songs by now, but alas, this is not the case. I’ve had some problems with a stubborn pain in the neck for the last couple of days, literally speaking. The back of my neck and my left shoulder have been bothering me, and I don’t know why. Bad pillow perhaps? No clue. I just woke up one day and it was hurting. It’s pretty much gone now, though, so I spent a chunk of time recording today.
Another annoying thing is that I keep noticing problems with the songs that I already recorded. I was listening to Nostalgia the other day, and noticed that the instruments are all out of tune. The guitars sound horrible together. I had planned on re-recording only the vocals, but I found that it’s pretty hard to sing in tune when the accompaniment is out of tune. But why? Why, oh why does it sound out of tune now? It sounded fine when I recorded the song in the first place. I know my ears haven’t gone mad, so my only conclusion is that the change of headphones and room to record in really made that much of a difference. Anyway, I just can’t leave the song all out of tune and crappy like that, so I’m going to re-record most of the instruments too.
After that I’m going to re-do Tomorrow, which I’m also not happy with, and then finally record the last song.
Sep
24
2009
The untimely death of eggs - part 4
Sep
23
2009
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. 
Sep
12
2009
The company I used to work for contacted me a few days ago and asked if I could do a small job for them. Money is never a bad thing for a starving musician, so I agreed. But now the job is done and today I’m re-recording some stuff. There were a few things in the songs that are already available on this site that I wasn’t quite happy with. Nothing huge, just some details here and there, a guitar part being slightly off, a short section that wasn’t quite in tune, stuff like that. So today I’m retouching those things and making sure everything is good.
When that is done, I’m going to record the last song for my collection to put it online. I think it’s a bit inaccurate to call it an “album”, since it’s all mp3 files and not an actual CD, so I’m just calling it a “collection” instead. Anyway, once the last song is done, I’m going to really start pushing with the marketing. I’m going to upload the collection on Last.fm, iTunes, and any other online music store I can find. I’m going to try and make some kind of music video and put it on YouTube as well. My songs are still going to be free to download here on my site, but I’m going to put them up for sale in the music stores as well.
I read a book called Long Tail by Chris Anderson a while ago. It’s an interesting book, I recommend reading it if you’re a musician like me. The term “Long Tail” is about online stores and the shape of the sales curve. To put it briefly, a regular store like your local CD shop, usually only carries a couple of thousand CDs at the time. They have to pay rent and salaries, etc. so for them it’s not profitable to keep CDs that don’t sell enough to pay for their shelf space and then some. Online stores don’t have that problem, since a domain and the server space cost way less than a physical store, so they can keep millions of albums in their catalogs.
Now, while the top 10 selling albums sell loads and loads of copies, the 1000th album on the list sells way less than the top 10. The curve drops quite rapidly. The 10 000th album sells even less, the curve drops even lower. But the interesting thing is that no matter how far down the list you go, the curve never actually drops down to zero – it just levels out more and more and hovers around a couple of copies a month. This is the long tail effect, and it’s pretty cool. No matter how many albums you put on the list, every single one of them gets bought at least once in a while.
For a guy like me that’s good news, because it means that if I write some decent music and put it up for sale with the big music stores, my music will get bought at least a couple of times a month. Of course, the music store will grab a chunk of the profit, so I’m not going to be making any big amounts of money with this, but it will be a couple of bucks every now and then. And the more songs I put up, the more money I will eventually earn. And if I manage to write some music that is actually good and becomes popular, I will of course make more money. But more importantly – for every person that actually buys one of my songs, there will be hundreds of people who hear it. Even if they don’t like it that much, it’s publicity for me.
Sep
5
2009
My latest song, Undecided, is now ready! Check it out and tell me what you think!
Undecided by Rainhat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
You can download the song for free and share it with anyone you like, but you may not use it for any kind of commercial purpose without my permission.
This song was fun, as it presented a new kind of challenge when I was recording it. During the chorus, there’s a part where the background vocals go “Ooo” in a three part harmony. The two lower ones were fine, but the top one was just a tiny bit above what my voice can actually do. The difficult part appears three times in the song, and I did ten or eleven takes but I just couldn’t hit those high notes in tune three times in a row. I got it somewhat OK once or twice, but I never managed to nail it the third time. But I didn’t want to leave it out, since the harmony didn’t sound as good without it. So what to do?
Some creative editing. I took the one part where I got the part right once and copied the first section where the high notes appear. Then I pasted it into the harmony in the other two sections. Since it’s only a small “ooo” part of the top voice that I couldn’t do, it doesn’t affect the lyrics. So what you actually hear is the exact same clip three times, but you can’t tell unless you’re listening very, very carefully. Then you might notice that the vibrato sounds very similar every time at the very end of the harmony part… I wouldn’t be able to sing that part live. But then again, I wouldn’t be able to sing a three part harmony background with myself anyway, so it’s not a problem. If I perform the full version of this song live, I’ll just have to get a good background singer to do it.
This was a very small and simple edit compared to what goes on when the professionals are producing a song with some famous band. Those two words in the lead vocals didn’t sound good? Do them again, and edit them into the song afterwards. I doubt that there are very many songs out there that aren’t made up of a gazillion short clips edited into a whole that sounds great. A good song can literally be all the best 3 second snippets from dozens and dozens of takes, all glued together.
