I’d Go the Whole Wide World Just to Find Her
[tl;dr — Click for dirty recording* of me playing a simple little song*]
or click below:
Well, bless you for actually reading this!
I just bought a 12 string acoustic guitar to record a song. I spent the weekend getting used to the feel of the coursed strings. I own a Fender StratXII (a 12 string Stratocaster) for the electric guitar side of things, so I’m not a stranger to the feel of 12 strings, but there is a world of difference between the pressures involved in fretting an acoustic 12 string and an electric. I have the destroyed fingertips to prove it.
So, I’m giving the fingertips a rest from the 12 string. However, I happened to leave the recorder running and my Yamaha 6 string is just irresistible to me, so I picked it up and decided to run through a simple little ditty by Wreckless Eric from 1977, Whole Wide World, and though I was mostly just playing it for enjoyment’s sake, I kind of liked what got recorded, in a trashy recording kind of way, barring a few enunciations that make me cringe on playback (which is part of the reason for making a quick and dirty recording* anyway).
So, if anyone is interested:
Whole Wide World
(soundcloud link at top of story, also)
* Dirty Recording? I should wash that thing! But seriously, I state this because:
- It was recorded off the cuff, for fun, into one mic, so I had only my ears to tell me how loud my vocals were in relation to my guitar, which is pretty much impossible (what your ears hear and what other people, or the microphone, hear, are significantly different (which explains the more entertaining contestants on American Idol) until you just develop a sense for it. I have not, but I’m getting better.
- This particular microphone is not intended for quality music recording. It’s a cheap USB podcast mic. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but the dynamics are unreliable and it tends to overload easily. It’s dead easy to just plug it in, however, and quickly record an idea so I don’t forget, then back to something else (usually back to sleep, for me, since I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with my ideas).
- The vocals are not practiced, as you can particularly note on the last chorus where I just flailed around a bit ad-libbing some melody changes and blah blah blah yadday yadday yadda.
- Because it’s what Dirt Nasty would do, dammit!
