My first Logic project yay!

Not earth-shattering by any means. Just me, my guitar, a little harmonica. I messed with the editing functions a little to get rid of a glitch (glitch was me forgetting my line, there was a bit of dead air there that I had to get rid of) and getting rid of the harmonica at the very beginning (silencing it) because it was ugly.

There will need to be a *lot* of cut-and-paste type editing done on the harmonica track. I had my guitar capo'ed to F because my vocals have become more limited in the years since I wrote the particular song, which means the song is in the key of, well, crap, something sharp (WTF, I just play the damned thing, it doesn't mean I know what key it's in, if I gotta guess I'll say it's in C# :-). Which means that the only harmonica in my collection that'll hit the right notes is a Hohner CX12 Chromatic in the key of C with the plunger pushed in (which makes it a C# harmonica). Now, a Hohner CX12 is a big honkin' mother of a harmonica. As in, you gotta slide that sucker a loooong ways in your mouth to hit any particular note, it's not like the little diatonic harmonicas that you can do quick sweeps on and shit. So I had to sorta experiment to get the slides going right. Still trying to decide whether I'll cut-and-paste on the current harmonica track, or just start over again now that I know where I want to put the harmonica and what I want to put there (some sweeps between phrasings on the verses, some blues wah at a particular place in the chorus, and one final slide and wah at the end).

Particularly interesting was that I brought my Bb Irish whistle over and tootled it into the vocals microphone a bit while doing a sample mixdown on the current three tracks with a particular set of compression settings blah blah blah, it sounds really smooth with that big fat-sounding vocals mike. I'll have to tootle a track and see if it makes it sound too busy with the harmonica in there. No, my Bb diatonic harmonica does *not* hit the right notes for this song, I tried it. Anyhow, if the harmonica and whistle don't co-exist in the same song, I know which one is going, and it's the whistle. The song is white trash blues and blues need harmonica like women need a bicycle. Or somethin' like that :-).

Next up: MIDI instruments. I need to pull out Bruce Springsteen's "The River" and look at what he does with the title track percussion-wise. Luckily my playing is always in time. As I found out when I managed to turn on that #$%@# metronome tick in my monitor headphones while I was recording the vocal and guitar tracks, which drove me nuts until I found the options setting to turn it off ("tick tick tick tick" AGH!). But one thing I noticed was that I was in perfect time with the ticks even though I wasn't using them or listening to them or anything (I was too busy playing and singing). Though it appears I need another MIDI cable to hook up my keyboard to the Lexicon Lambda, sigh... another run to The Starving Musician tomorrow. Oh well!

Anyhow, once I have the harmonica track fixed up I'll probably let you guys hear the initial mixdown as a really-crappy-quality monophonic mp3. It's just too late tonight and I'm tired, I'm going to bed. G'nite!

-- Badtux the Music Penguin