Town in a Lake

June 15, 2010 4:07 PM

My loud sloppy garage rock version of Jessamyn's song about Randolph being in a lake.

Lyrics are largely incomprehensible, which seems in keeping with the idiom.

posted by cortex (12 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite

:)
posted by jessamyn at 4:25 PM on June 15, 2010 [1 favorite]


Plucky!
posted by Rock The Word at 5:49 PM on June 15, 2010


You're doing that Johnny Rotten sort of punk accent – heh. Shades of "Serpentine Pad."

Awesome.
posted by koeselitz at 5:53 PM on June 15, 2010


doot-DOOT clap-CLAP
posted by not_on_display at 6:38 PM on June 15, 2010


That was pretty fast and it was pretty DAMN GOOD.
posted by snsranch at 8:01 PM on June 15, 2010


This seems ripe for some ska overdub.
posted by Corduroy at 11:58 PM on June 15, 2010


And cowbell!

I take it you didn't use a click track this time, eh? What order did you record stuff in?
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 2:56 AM on June 16, 2010


I take it you didn't use a click track this time, eh?

Heh. I used one, I just didn't use it all that well. It got buried pretty quickly and I didn't bother going back. The drum track is on a macro level more or less on tempo, which was good enough to work from. On a micro level, the drums are kind of all over the place; trying to play an unfamiliar beat at 240 bpm is really, really stretching my abilities at this point.

I actually had to spend a half hour just sort of getting my right foot and right hand to do the basic dotted-sixteenth/sixteenth/dotted-sixteenth/sixteenth/quarter thing (KICK-kuh-SNARE-snuh-KICK, if you will) underlying the whole thing without getting distracted and with being able to build in other stuff when the drums pick up a bit more. And the tom break later on is all consistently either rushing or lagging the beat. It was fun.

Anyway, after the drums and maybe one guitar track I couldn't hear the click anymore, so it all sort of got extra loose after that.

What order did you record stuff in?

I laid down a vocal guide track just to talk through the changes, since the structure was really improvised (so I'm like counting off verses, announcing changes into the solo or the toms, etc); recorded drums; clean electric, dirty electric, second dirty for the lead break; bass; lead vox, harmony vox, extra shouting-across-the-room vox; and a couple of hand clap tracks that also had some shouting on them because at that point I had probably scared the neighbors anyway so why not just go for it.
posted by cortex at 7:16 AM on June 16, 2010


If you're curious, here's that vocal guide track plus drums and hand claps, if you want to hear what my improved vocal notetaking sounds like. I'd have included some of the other musical components mixed low, but I didn't think to make the guide track be in key with the song so it just sounds horrid when it coexists with the guitars and bass.

I did roughly the same thing, though a little more carefully, when I was recording my album earlier this year, laying down a vocal place-holder track against the click for most of the final tracks so that I wouldn't lose track of the specific arrangement choices I'd made and fuck up takes by jumping into a change a bar earlier, etc.
posted by cortex at 7:28 AM on June 16, 2010


Haha, this is lovely! :D
posted by MaiaMadness at 11:43 AM on June 16, 2010


I think this one's going in the Me First and the Gimme Gimmie's folder.
posted by lysdexic at 7:54 PM on June 16, 2010


Metafilter has a theme song now!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:50 PM on June 24, 2010


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