Week 1, Til Spring

Ok. Here we go. You should see an audio player below with a short song entitled Til Spring. If you don’t see the player let me know.

YouTube link for iPhone

This is a new song. I’m not even sure that I had completely sold myself on the idea of doing this project when I wrote this. I was checking out recording with the FourTrack application on my iPhone and well this all came together pretty easily and sounded better than I’d expected. I’m pretty sure there’s a correlation then, that I realized that I could maybe pull this off after putting this together in a couple of hours.

This song is in the Hovland Tuning: F-A-D-G-A-E.

Hovland was my band during the later half of the 90’s and encroaching into the 00’s for maybe a year. I used this tuning pretty much exclusively with an occasional drop-D variation. It’s got a minor/darker sound that I liked and fit in pretty well with the slow-core aesthetic that Hovland at least started with though we sped up a good deal over the years. The Hovland tuning was actually a variation of the tuning that I’d invented for a previous band, Half Hour Action Drama, which was F#-A-D-F#-A-E.

1/2AD in it’s very short and sadly mostly undocumented existence was a collaboration between Matthew Raymo, Brendan Reed (an early member of Arcade Fire – his current band is called Clues), and me that mostly occurred in Williamsburg VA in 1995-96, and is some of the music that I’m most proud of now – it was two guitars and drums and was heavily influenced by Polvo and Sonic Youth. I think it’s aged pretty well. I’ll see if maybe Brendan knows what ever happened to those 4-track recordings that just used SM-57’s and the condenser mic on his video camera. If we ever find anything and can digitize it, I’ll post it.

Anyway, back to this song, Til Spring. There are five total tracks, all recorded using the 4-Track app. The first four are the original – acoustic guitar and three vocal tracks – recorded in my kitchen. A little later I added a double of the guitar track in my dining room using my Orange 30R practice amp and my Fender Telecaster Thinline. The song was mixed in Reaper with a touch of reverb and EQ on the vocals. I ran the entire mix through a pretty saturated modeled tube compressor. There are obviously some rough edges, but all things considered I’m pretty happy with the sound.  I will definitely be doing some songs with live drums, but I’ll need to do a bit more setup for that.

One last important thing to mention: This project wouldn’t be possible without the patience and good will of my dear wife Jenn. I am grateful.

4 Comments to Week 1, Til Spring

joel
September 7, 2009

nicely done, corey.

Also, and i’ve been waiting so long to ask this:

HEY MANNNN….IS THAT BENJAMIN?

-joel

dave b
September 7, 2009

very cool – I’ll be plug into this each week – psyched to see what you come up with.

ChristopherJ
September 9, 2009

NIce!
I have the four track app as well, but have yet to use it.
Can’t wait to hear the next song!

-Cj

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