Forgery League

Julian and I kicked around ideas for The CD last night, and we debated the merits of various ways of recording a drum track - including renting a rehearsal space. Reason being: we sort of settled on Stars For Searchlights as a cool title, which fits nicely with a photo Sean took of us recently. But the then-title track demands a drum track with, for example, a big tom fill when it goes into the bridge at half-tempo.

So that evening, I figured, what the hell… and dropped all of US$15 on a 50-meg download membership at PrimeSounds.com, then hunted around until I found a stack of very serviceable hihat loops, tom hits and so on. Plugged them into a cheapass freeware sampler for Cubase, and went to town. A few hours later, I had a pretty solid and natural-sounding backing track. Doesn’t quite beat The Real Thing, but it suddenly shot “Searchlights” out of the rink compared to the other tracks we’ve recorded so far. So we’ll probably have to revisit at least one or two of them.

Yay for technology. It’s also been nice working with two monitors. At the very least, I can do my work on one screen while the cat chases my cursor around the other. (He discovered this pastime about three days ago. There are now noseprints all over the glass. In other news, our bathtub plug keeps ending up in the hall outside our apartment.)

Sean gets back tomorrow. I’ve been enjoying taking on a semi-producer role - mailing out packages, redoing and updating our various web sites, researching airport limos in New Jersey. Making things happen, guiding them along… I could get used to this.