Ankle Tattoo Blues: Post-Mortem

Sunday evening, listening to Glenn Miller. Life is good and so is that brass section.

A week later, I have no desire to go back in and make any further tweaks, which confirms that the project is complete. There are things I might do differently if I had it to do again. Maybe a third guitar part instead of the piano. I could clean up some of the vocal distortion near the end. Add scat vocals or a guitar solo to give more life to the instrumental sections. But these are things I can do if I ever decide to perform the song live. Just because the project is complete doesn’t mean the song won’t continue to evolve. The recording captures a moment in time: it is a sonic slice of life.

That said, here are some things that worked well:

• The bridge section. Although it came in at the last minute and created more work for me, I’ve reached the point where I can’t imagine the song without it.
• The guitar parts. I like doubling the same part on a clean channel and a distorted channel, and on the left and on the right. Gives the song more depth. It’s like how when you look at a painting with a strong background, a good foreground looks that much better.

And lessons to be learned:

• Have the song structure in place before starting to program. Trying to fit in drum fills to match new sections was very time intensive. The song would have benefitted from a few more fills to connect sections, but not at the cost of several more hours of programming.
• Check tuning, check levels. This is probably even more important when recording than when playing live, where you can adjust on the fly and find your mark during the gig. When the virtual tape is rolling, you want to make sure the quality of sound matches your performance.
• Reharse, visualize, and aim for the best peformance possible. Prepare to nail all the parts, but don’t overdo it. You don’t want to burn yourself out, and you don’t want to kill the song’s vitality by trying to get the “perfect” take. The best take often isn’t the one that is most technically accurate, but rather the one that is most honest. Never polish the feeling out of a song.
• If you’re having technical difficulties, try the obivous; if that doesn’t work, take a break - the solution may become obvious after you’ve had a chance to step away from the process. When I was losing tracks on the PS5, I became frustrated and couldn’t deliver a quality performance. I tried to focus on solutions as much as possible, knowing that fixing the problem would alleviate my frustration and help me reach my goal of completing the song. As it turned out, the two most effective troubleshooting strategies were to (a) constantly optimize my Compact Flash card and (b) power off/power on. But it took time, lost takes, and lots of “stepping away” to finally figure this out.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this piece. I am capable of better, but I’m happy that I was able to accomplish what I set out to do, which was to commit Ankle Tattoo Blues to “tape” by the end of February. I have completed the first stage of my overall goal of this project to produce a CD of original songs “that I can share with a small group of family and friends without embarrassing myself or them.”

Woo-hoo!

On this day…

• 2005: Better Than Clapton: Lyrics — The date on my sheet of yellow legal paper says June 10, 2004, but I honestly don’t remember when I [...]