Well, after about a year and a half, I've finally finished the guitar and keyboard parts for this project. I didn't really expect it to take this long but it turned out that there was a lot of experimenting and fiddling to do, especially with the keyboard parts. The guitar parts were more or less written as the songs were written on guitar, so I knew what I wanted to play and was able to execute it. Plus my style of guitar playing basically requires three sound choices, clean, a little dirty, and overdriven, so my palette wasn't too large. The keyboard however (my Roland Fantom X6 or whatever it is) has a ga-zillion sounds to choose from and anybody that knows me, knows that for me too much choice is not a good thing. For example, I might have an idea of a string sound for a part, but I would have to go through ALL 50 or so of the string sounds to find the one I like. Now imagine me doing that with horn parts, lead sounds, piano sounds etc and all of the sudden, it's an hour later and i haven't even recorded the part much less figured out exactly what to play. So all in all, the keyboard parts were the most time consuming.
Another thing which added to the length of time was my perfectionist nature. I wanted to make sure I was as close as possible to the kick and snare beats which meant redoing simple grooves and rhythms until I got it right. And even when i got it close, i still wasn't always happy. But listening to it a day or two later usually resulted in me not hearing those nit picky parts and being generally happy with what was put down.
Other things to contend with were the break down of my old keyboard rig during the beginning of recording resulting in an expensive new one which took me about 3 weeks to learn about and program. Plus the day to day of living life sometimes meant i couldn't record when i had planned to. C'est la vie.
But it's done and hopefully my job will now be to record Barry's songs (he's playing all parts on his keyboard), produce the bass parts, organize the vocal parts, and then finally record the vocal parts. Still a ways off from being finished, but at least this step is done. And now i'm going off to bed and plan to enjoy my week off work.
Wilton
Another thing which added to the length of time was my perfectionist nature. I wanted to make sure I was as close as possible to the kick and snare beats which meant redoing simple grooves and rhythms until I got it right. And even when i got it close, i still wasn't always happy. But listening to it a day or two later usually resulted in me not hearing those nit picky parts and being generally happy with what was put down.
Other things to contend with were the break down of my old keyboard rig during the beginning of recording resulting in an expensive new one which took me about 3 weeks to learn about and program. Plus the day to day of living life sometimes meant i couldn't record when i had planned to. C'est la vie.
But it's done and hopefully my job will now be to record Barry's songs (he's playing all parts on his keyboard), produce the bass parts, organize the vocal parts, and then finally record the vocal parts. Still a ways off from being finished, but at least this step is done. And now i'm going off to bed and plan to enjoy my week off work.
Wilton