“El Clásico” Echo

Revisiting the Choose Must playlist: Day 8

27 April 2016
This one’s a bit of a mess. It started life as an idea that I captured on my phone. I have at least 60 other ideas recorded as voice memos dating back just under two years since I’ve had this phone. Some are fully thought out acoustic explorations like today’s, others are just riffs on a quickly plugged in electric, and some are just interesting repetitive noises I always thought might make good backing tracks to something.

I imported the audio from the phone into GarageBand. Now, that sounds easy enough, but if I remember right, it took me more than a few frustrating minutes to figure out how to get GarageBand to read the file. I think I eventually opened the memo in Audacity, converted it to a .wav file, and then imported it into GarageBand. All because I wanted to fake a click track underneath it.

It’s not the cleanest performance I’ve ever captured, but I wanted to stop hiding behind a bunch of distortion. After more than a week of these, my calluses were finally built back up to what they were like in my touring days, and I was starting to get some of my chops back. I guess that’s what is supposed to happen after playing for more than two hours a day again.

When it came to adding the click track, I had to do it by hand. I obviously strayed rhythmically, so just picking a tempo and automating a stick on the rim of a snare wasn’t going to work. I only gave it a few passes, but every time I tried to follow the guitar, my clumsy attempts to follow my own clumsy strumming pattern just accentuated how clumsily I had played. Still, I wanted an honest portrayal of the work I put in for the day.

Oh, I could probably write another 500 words about how much I dislike both teams involved in El Clásico while watching it nonetheless, but that’s an obsession for another time.

\m/ #100DaysEcho