On Tuesday night I listened back to “Dead End Road” with fresh ears and noticed that there were some things that needed to be cleaned up before mixing. First I noticed that James was a little weak on the background vocals. He did sing for 4 hours. Plus he was out of key on a few parts. So that needs to be redone. There were some clicks on the bass track where I did some punching. For some of the clicking it looks like a bug in Logic Pro. The waveform on top, the punch is cut clean, meaning the region is drawn at the silence before the start of the note, and the region before lines up at the end of the previous note. What is happening is that Logic is actually clicking at the point the waveform starts under the punched track. So, to fix I have to cut out the original portion so there waveform to be covered up. I noticed this when cleaning up the vocal tracks for the Moto Star song, “The One,” last week. After I got through with that I had to fix the piano track. I wrote the piano part using Reason by Propellerhead. It is my now favorite program for composing music. The piano part was written to the original demo down by click, so it was quantized. When we finished with the tracking we noticed that it was too perfect. So I had to go through the piano part, adjusting note by note, to make sure it played naturally with the other instruments.
I started working on a new track using Reason. It started out as a dance track but somehow evolved into an Industrial track. It has a cool drum part, almost drum and bass-ish. When I wrote the electronic bass part I found a really cool distorted sound that gave the track a Marylin Manson kinda feel. So, I went with it. Now it is no longer Manson-like, but definately more along the lines of my other Industrial tracks. After this one is completely written in Reason, James and I will start working on the arangement adn natural instrumentation in Logic.