here we go on a new adventure, the creative365! i’ll define the rules in a subsequent post…it’s late and i’m headed to bed! but for my first creative endeavor, the mrs. and i recorded a cover of the decemberists “down by the water” song from their latest album, “the king is dead.”

tools used: garageband, a guitar, mic, firebox.

this was the best of the takes we did in the time we had. lessons learned include finding a different location with less echo than our canyon of a living room. making sure junior is occupied to minimize distractions. and making sure the mic is turned on on the camera so we can more easily sync the audio (hence no video track here, just the audio).

i’ve (obviously) had no vocal training, but i’m married to someone who teaches that sort of thing, so we’re hoping this will all get better as we do it more, but for a first attempt at anything like this, i’m okay with the results. and it was a lot of fun singing with my wife.

so for #1 of 365, here we go…

Down by the Water Cover

update:

i wanted to come back in and add a little more to this post; namely, some of the lessons learned.

first, there is an interesting article on the psychology today blog on the science of success. in it, the writer states:

Start any new project by saying  ”I’m not going to be good at this right away, I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay.”

that’s obviously the case here. the result is far from perfect, but my goal is to learn and get better.

next, singing with my wife is one of the coolest things ever. she’s very patient with working with someone who has (obviously) never had any lessons in this sort of thing, and was very helpful in getting me this far.

in the room for improvement category (ha, a pun), the room we were in was not right for a number of reasons…primarily the echo from the large empty space and high, vaulted ceilings. if you listen, you can also hear other sounds in the background (junior and a xylophone), so a location with less outside noise would also have been preferable.

on the technical side, i started off the morning recording separate tracks for the guitar, my audio, and the wife’s audio. but we ran short on time so we just did one combined recording. that meant we had to have the mic a little further back to get the three components, which introduced more echo from the room.

i was also recording video to go along with the audio, but the auto-shutof engaged on the shotgun mic attached to the camera, so we had no reference audio track on the video, so i decided to scrap it since synching the audio and video manually would have been too challenging to finish in the time we had. (adding “check audio on camera” to the pre-recording checklist for next time).

overall, it was a fun project and a good learning experience for the start of the new 365 project. more to come!