Day 5 began with my second trip to Guitar Center of the week. I picked up a Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 usb audio interface and rushed home to record vocals. Setup was quick and easy, multiplying my regret at wasting most of the previous day trying to set up my outdated Mbox 2.
I closed the door on my bedroom and slightly embarrassedly began to record the vocal takes for “One of Us”. Listening to the recording, it is clear that I am out of practice, in my bedroom, singing quietly and completely lacking confidence. The results are not great, and will not be shared. But, I accomplished my goal of writing a song with lyrics, which is the important result. Even though I won’t share the output with you, I was still able to hit my sprint goal.
After recording the vocals, I spend the afternoon adding effects to the vocals. Adding compressors, reverb and distortion helped, but could not fix the problems with the source material. Someone needs to create a De-Shamer plug in for Ableton. Even going to heavy vocoder only exacerbated the problem.
I got to a good enough point on the vocals then set about to arranging the track. By the time the clock struck 5pm on Friday, I had a 3:30 minute song ready to share with the world. I fell short on a number of sprint goals; I didn’t have time to do any embellishments, velocity programming or vocal effects. The song clearly feels like a first draft, and the vocals are horrible. But, my sprint was complete and I finished a song to a sharable state for the first time in years.
Day 5 Burndown
