tab-clearing again

okay i know this is already everywhere but: schwarzenegger vs. legislature lulz. he shoulda just said "yeah deny this."

in not funny news, now that focus on the family's state proxy has failed to either get a special-rights-for-them exemption from campaign spending and secrecy laws, the national focus on the family has started dumping anti-gay money into the local race for referendum 71, sending out mailers that try to make recipients think evil faggits will teach fag pervert sex to first graders if it passes. contemptible, as always; it's what they've been doing in maine and what worked in california, too.

don't forget to vote YES on referendum 71 btw. unless you hate me.

nationally, the obama administration working with democratic leadership have managed to remove all meaningful reform in the patriot act. I like this quote from Julian Sanchez in The Nation:

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of "state secrets." We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

...because it's entirely how this system works.

You can tell I'm waking up because I'm starting to use capital letters. I think I'll leave it that way. G'morning. ^_^

A week already?

Since last post I wrapped up - I hope - recording bed track source material for all the mandolin-led pieces, and I even (omg) did my first... um... I think the term is drop-in? It's where you record a little snippet that you're using as a patch in a bad spot for an otherwise-good recording. It's different to other recording, in that you really need to match not just tempo but tone and feel of the recording you're patching. In this case that was pretty easy, but there will certainly be more difficult versions ahead.

But mostly I'm working on the bouzouki-led tracks. My bouzouki work has not been as crisp as my mandolin work, mostly because I've only been playing Kohaku since mid-April. (That's compared playing Summer since January '08, three times as long.) Six months is a lot of time and I'm starting to get there, but I don't have the... solidity? that I have on mandolin, at least not as consistently. There really are fundamental differences between how you approach the two instruments. So I've been doing a lot of playing and practicing just on getting the right kind of sounds.

"Getting Away with It" is not going to be easy to get right for the recording. Technically right is one thing (and there's nothing really that complicated about the song except it's another zillion-chord-wonder), but interpretatively right and energetically right is another entirely. I'm pretty sure that I'll be recording a bed track for it on (...checks schedule...) Friday that'll be timing-accurate but not good, and I won't end up keeping it. Maybe I'll surprise myself.

I'm also finding that I'm doing 2-3 hours of prep (including recording-specific rehearsal and warmups) for 20-30 minutes of actual live microphone and "tape." I suspect this is kind of normal? The ratio has actually been improving, which is good, mostly because I'm getting used to the equipment.

This afternoon I'm going to be giving a bunch of recorded tracks a really careful listen, and hopefully some editing. It's scary! 'cause it is. And more voicework. I'm not the kind of intuitive singer I'd like to be, but I have the voice I have, so I'm doing what I can with it. If Crime and the Forces of Evil are ever a Real Band, I'll probably be singing backup and harmonies, not lead.

Well, that was useless

Damn that was tiring. And ineffective! "Thought You Knew" (a bouzouki-led song) is going to need a completely different approach to building a bed track; it just changes tempo too much and frankly doesn't work as a constant tempo song. It just sounds and feels all wrong. There's about five different tempo things going on in it (intro, outro, bridge, chorus/verse, linking material) and I thought I could take the linking elements to the chorus/verse tempo and record most of the song on one beat, with the bridge/intro/outro added in later, but I was WRONG with bold and small caps.

So now I need to figure out whether I just try to do a perfect(ish) nontempoed recording (or close enough that I can patch it cleanly) or do a bunch of tempoed fragments and assemble them into something at least tempo-correct. If you've done this before, suggestions will be happily taken.