With regards to my previous attempt to “be” the rhythm section, my good friend, and Get-Up drummer, Alan said: “There are moments of rhythmic harmony though also enough off beats that would make it hard to build upon.” (That could be said of the state of the planet.) Alas, I had listened with a fresh ear prior to receiving his text and realized that it would have to be fixed or re-recorded.

I dug in this morning to see what I could salvage.

Alan recommended:

“…if you’re close to the beat quantizing can help.

Also, lots of programs have visual screens to be able to literally move the notes to the beat.

…consider a click that you record to then ultimately delete.”

I have worked with the quantization feature of my DAW before and did a search to see if I could find out if I was using it correctly.  The results of the search were both disappointing, there were a lot of YouTube tutorials (I prefer text & screen shots), and intimidating – I was reminded that the great deal I’ve learned about recording is a minuscule portion of the whole.

I concluded that, for what I’ve been doing, I’ve been using the quantization feature correctly.

As far as the song pieces, I deleted everything except the drums. I found a section that was decent and looped it. I quantized – I think to the 16th note – and moved a few drum “hits.” After “committing” to the quantization, I tried applying a Swing “groove” – a software feature about which I read during my research that’s supposed to give the beat a more “human” feel.

I feel that the result is better – though I’m not quite there yet. I leaned hard on The Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” in the hopes that I could achieve something close to that soul “feel.”   I recorded bass again – streamlining the part to support the desired result. I practiced some singing, borrowing some of the phrasing from the classic track.

I think, a while back, I said that I would only be posting “finished” stuff from then on out, but it’s harder than I thought it would be. Back to Alan: “Timing is tough, especially if you are building the songs track by track.”

Here is my latest imperfect effort with some practice singing.

It seems like it’s dragging and a bit stiff.

In Search Of…

-LeonEd Nimoy