Overdubs, using the mapper

It's always pretty nice to devote a day to doing something you've been meaning to do for forever. Yesterday I devoted a whole day and night to redoing the bass line for Cheap Thrills. It's pretty much note-for-note what the bass line already was, except now instead of being played by hand on a synth, it's sequenced using my sampled bass, which is actually my real electric bass sampled as individual notes and ... this is very important ... exterraneous finger/string noise. Also, I used a program I'd written to help map out the tempo from Jeff's wildly fluctuating drum track, this way the timing of the bass part is dead-on and locks perfectly with it.

It's kind of relevant to Slab of Clay, in that my remix of that in its current state does not have the synthesizer chords in it yet, and I'm going to need the mapper program for those as well. The new version uses, as I've found to be very effective in many other songs in the past (including Cheap Thrills), "stolen" drums from other peoples' sessions. I've got all these reels and ADATs of multitrack sessions with Jeff, Garrett, the Peachies, and so on, and the various tracks in isolation come in quite handy (*cough*) as raw material to be used in my own stuff. Drums in particular are great because you can pretty much use any drum track for any song, provided it's anywhere in the ballpark tempo-wise. Often times it's an improvement because fills and accents happen in places I wouldn't have thought to put them.

When I re-do a song to a new drum part, like with Slab, sometimes I'll want to use some of the tracks from my original version. The tempo won't be perfectly matched up, so I'll have to use time stretching. This involves some math. The new Slab is quite a bit faster, and I'm particularly pleased at how clean I've managed to keep the sax solo sounding even after smooshing it to fit. Same for bit guitar things that come in here and there. I'm keeping Kim's vocal and the guards' vocals (done by me), also nicely time-adjusted -- but will be re-doing my main vocal part.

The synth, which is really the backbone of how the song was written, will be done using the same sound on the same instrument, the old Casio CZ-1 leaning against the dining room wall, all beat up with half its hardware gutted out and various stickers and pictures taped to it. For the timing, I will use my program again to map out the tempo. This one is a lot less erratic than Cheap Thrills, but it was good to start with that song first because it's the ultimate test that the program is working correctly.

I still have no idea what will appear in the film.