Where were we? Last November I mentioned that I was unsure of the way forward after collecting 70 draft ideas in GarageBand. I then spent about a month stitching various ideas and ditties together into 13 tracks. I think 11 will be on the main part of the album and then a further two for those who buy the download.
Overall I am quite chirpy about it. It doesn’t really match anything else that I have made but that wasn’t the intention. It varies in style and is much more energetic than most of my other material. I can’t say that I enjoyed the process, and I’m definitely not enjoying the mastering process (again). Using the phone as an instrument was quite unsatisfying, and the sound quality of patching it via an iRig is patchy (excuse the pun). Lots of equalizing etc. I think there must be digital ways of doing it but I think that recording it via an analogue interface means that the music still has some element of humanity about it, like bits of syncopation and off key elements. My intention was to work like William Orbit did on Blur’s 13, and in some respects, the approach yields similar outcomes in terms of sound-scaping. That is probably my favourite part of this project, finding happy mistakes or strange tunes that could co-exist without being recorded for one another.
So, mastering hell awaits. I am already sick of a couple of the tracks. I will keep exporting versions and living with them for a while on headphones while going for walks, and then chip away at improving it. My hope is to get this completed by the beginning of May, and catch that Bandcamp Friday. By leaving that amount of time, I hope I won’t settle on dodgy mixes like I have in the past, which were a case of abandoning projects or rushing them before another project or trench of work came along.
Title wise, I am uncertain. Working with Smart Phone, Dumb User at the moment, which was a title track on the album. There isn’t any lyrical conceptualisation to this project, just the process of phone as an instrument, so the title seems fitting. I have time to see how it feels. Similarly, no design work yet, so also need to give that some consideration.
