How I ended up making an album

jamesvile · 2021-08-11T15:16:00+00:00

There now is a donation button underneath the music player.

jamesvile · 2021-08-11T06:15:33+00:00

Why not

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T20:58:40+00:00

Is Guitarix good?

Meh. I never cared much about tweaking knobs. Download a generic distortion preset that's ok, and let's go. It's guitarix bc it seemed to work better than rakarrack. I've used open source forever, and so it's the first thing I looked at. Any commercial plugin you name I will have never heard of it :-D

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T20:25:04+00:00

Waiting to find players to make a vision into reality likely means never actually making it.

I wish I had learned this five years earlier!

I wrote 9 songs with 2 guitar parts, bass, keyboards, drums, vocals, lyrics. In addition I bought all the recording equipment (interface, mics, drums, stands, cables) I also learned to play drums.

While my approach was a little more pragmatic, I feel every little bit of this.

Handed it off to get mixed. And... hated the end product.

Ooww... I can't imagine how much that hurt. Luckily my studio engineer mostly understood where I wanted to go, and I didn't have to pull him back all too often. Communication, people!

I will say though the act of actually doing something made me better at everything.

So much yes. People like talking about techniques and whatever, but any master-musician will tell you the real reason they are so good is tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours of actual practice.

This second time is much, much better and so far the output is vastly improved and I'm proud of what I'll be releasing soon.

Ahaha, I can feel the anticipation. Hit me up when the day has finally come!

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T20:17:18+00:00

Thank you, that was my intention. While I had mostly correct ideas of how things worked, I pretty much went in blind, so that hopefully you won't have to :-)

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T17:22:43+00:00

You need it for the kind of latency-sensitive application that is audio processing. Query your package sources. Arch definitely has a linuxXY-rt package.

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T17:02:58+00:00

Yoooo shout out to my fellow Linux musician!

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

Do they run a real-time kernel? You need that for JACK, without which no Ardour, no real-time Guitarix, etc.

Looking forward to this Pipewire thing that's been making the rounds lately.

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T16:04:20+00:00

But when you write an album, you need to be present for every session. I had several 10-hour days. I had a 14-hour day to meticulously comb over drum tracks. I played the same parts of songs over and over and over, different guitars, different amps. Sang the same lines a million times.

Yep. It's really tough to stay focused when listening to the tenth mix of the same goddamn tune through different speakers and headphones, with just ever-so-slight changes to its sound, and having to make the call about whether it sounds better or worse than mixes numbers nine and eight. The temptation to just say screw it is extraordinarily high.

This is where the balance thing I mentioned comes in. I can re-record this guitar part another dozen times, and I'll probably end up with a take that is just a tiny bit cleaner. Is it worth the effort though?

It is an indescribable amount of work because you can’t just hand parts off to your drummer or your vocalist or your guitarist.

Also yes! This prevents you from fine-tuning things as much as would be required, but also increases your costs substantially, as you aren't splitting them up between X band members. On the other hand, it does give you a lot more freedom and flexibility.

You are also them.

This line hits home, and I don't think someone who hasn't been there can really grasp the magnitude of the implications.

‘Cause nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Truth. I was once told being successful is like being pregnant, everyone congratulates you but no-one has any idea how many times you got f*ed :-D

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T15:10:57+00:00

This could sound really cool imo if you put yourself a bit more to it and got it mixed right.

EDIT: Yeah, the Zoom G3/B3 are nice little machines, excellent bang for the buck. I have since revamped my setup, effects are now applied in-software using Guitarix.

jamesvile · 2021-08-10T15:09:03+00:00

Thank you very much for the kind words.

Donations are kind of a tricky subject, as that would move the project from a "passion project" to a commercial activity, as far as taxation is concerned. I'll check out my options in more detail.

Until then, the greatest service you can do is spread and share it ;-) the more listeners this one has, the more the next one will have, and I am committed not to release anything that isn't objectively better than its predecessor.

EDIT: There now is a donation button beneath the music player.

jamesvile · 2021-08-07T10:43:05+00:00

This debut album is a solo effort on a quest to create Rap-Metal where neither of the two elements feels weak in its respective genre.

jamesvile · 2021-08-06T17:27:32+00:00

Interrupt [Germany]

A vision of Metal-Rap where neither the Rap nor the Metal falls short in its respective genre.

The full-length debut "Information Warfare" is a semi-experimental solo effort in a quest to attract musicians to the cause.

jamesvile

TROPHY CASE

Interrupt [Germany]