Moses Made the Middle Part

Noisy old testament stuff.

Another songfight entry, another last-minute breakneck recording the morning of the deadline. This is a lot more of a mess than the last one, though; I got distracted by all the Steven Slater stuff this last week and totally failed to work out the little idea I had last monday, and forcing it this morning didn't go all that well.

I'd like to take some of these ideas and polish them and make a much better recording out of at that point. I like some of what's here already, but it's all parts and no sum at this point. Mix is really astoundingly rough, arrangement is only half there, and the lyrics are hasty placeholder stuff.

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posted by cortex (9 comments total)

Lyrics:

And the pharaoh says
I want you outta my town
NIMBYgyptian with a capital N

You know those plagues and locusts
Don't do anything for the housing market

So they take off
But then the deal goes south
The pharaoh sends a bunch of his men

And it's rock-and-a-hard-place
Chariots closing and the sea imposing

And the Jews say
You with the beard and the staff
You think maybe you could give us a hand

And Moses made the middle part
And through the muddy gap they trod
And then he closed it up again
And those Egyptians went to God
posted by cortex at 11:02 AM on August 16, 2010

Ya know man, I really enjoy hearing music that isn't over-thought or too rehearsed. Also, while I dig this whole song, that lead guitar was all balls! I guess the whole song is, and I really like that.

Now, for the record, and I'm thinking about unSane's fairly recent post about Amp vs. Simulator...what did you use? I'm thinking amp, because it was pretty damn dynamic and kicked ass.
posted by snsranch at 6:38 PM on August 16, 2010

Straight up hardware. My Gibson L6-S into my Fender 2x12 Deville, first stage gain about halfway around the dial, miked with my solonoid kick mic in a big unfinished basement about a foot or so from the face of the amp looking in the general direction of the left cone.

The tone on the solo in the middle is a little thin for my taste, but chording in the choruses is pretty good as a match for the piano plonking. And I'm doing a bunch of octave double-stops later on with an extra track doing approximately the same thing but an octave up in some cases, and that's frankly my favorite guitar noise on the recording.

I need to play with more semi-doubled electric lines; it goes against my lazy "improvising means I don't have to memorize a line or play it all that cleanly" working philosophy, but I pretty consistently like the tone I have a hard time being satisfied with electric tone.
posted by cortex at 7:37 AM on August 17, 2010

And, just for the hell of it, the twenty-eight minute long ambient slowmo version made with PaulStretch, inspired by this thread about slowing the Bieber.
posted by cortex at 8:45 AM on August 17, 2010

i like this. the guitar has big testicles. sonically speaking.
posted by peterkins at 9:50 AM on August 17, 2010

Good lyrics and instrumentation. The band really comes together and gives this a classic rock feel. I'd like to hear what this would sound like in a more controlled studio environment. It sounds very live with little mixing happening. It's a great arrangement.
posted by tunewell at 12:42 PM on August 18, 2010

Heh. For what it's worth, tunewell, the band is just me in a stack of overdubs. I've been trying to get better at pulling off a simulated live-multiple-humans sort of feeling for the last year or so in a lot of my recording work, so I'll take it as a vote of confidence on that front if it felt like that's what was going on to you.
posted by cortex at 12:53 PM on August 18, 2010

I like this one, actually. I do think it sounds more like an actual band than some of your other stuff. I read some of the reviews at SongFight, seems like a rough crowd over there.
posted by burnmp3s at 4:42 AM on August 19, 2010

Eh, just a different approach to the feedback loop I think. It's interesting getting a different collection of reactions to stuff; we're pretty explicitly nice over here whereas I think a lot of the SF regulars are more in a "you showed up, and good for you, now I'm gonna tell you what I liked and definitely what I didn't" mode that's useful in its own right if you're in the market for that sort of thing.

I wonder if there's a "bad mix, guitars too loud = live band" lofi effect in play here? If I had mixed this more carefully/rationally (read: at al), would that have sounded less like four guys goofing around in a basement and more like me tracking over myself repeatedly?
posted by cortex at 7:51 AM on August 19, 2010