Re: Snow Day (NS/Stick & MIDI)
https://soundcloud.com/stephen-sink-1/snowday-enceladusSo the Shure MV88 stereo mic for lightning devices came yesterday and I've been testing it around every room and closet and bathroom in the house. I've tried the Gettysburg address and then sang a line from the new song, "Snow Day in Hell" in each location and then compared the sound waves with the headphones on.
The results:
Worst place in the house: the basement studio, where 99% of everything is recorded via a direct line into the board. I used various vocal baffle boxes that I bought and covered it all with blankets and coats but I could not muffle out the dull roar of the basement heater's pink noise (pink noise is white noise + bass). I actually built a "vocal booth" this summer in a corner of the basement, using moving-van blankets and foam with the pointy bumps to muffle things. It gets really hot in there really quick, however. It needs some sort of ventilation. And still didn't sound that good, considering the time and effort put into it this summer.
2nd worst place in the house: the master bathroom, where I've set up my "real" vocal mics on stands before. The reverb that the empty bathroom provides actually sounded better in theory than in practice. In practice, it was a really shitty reverb sound that I couldn't EQ away. I want as dry and clean a sound as possible, and the bathroom sucked for the first part.
Best place in the house was my wife's walk-in closet, that was full of clothes and boxes of stuff from Japan. It was basically a giant box of sound dampeners, except there's a thin outside wall and you can hear the neighbor's dogs bark outside, at the most random times.
As I suspected--and hoped--the car in the garage was the best place to record vocals: warm it up (it's -7 F here with the wind chill!), and then shut the garage door, turn off the climate control, and let 'er rip into the mic, using my ipad mini with headphones, and the Shure lightning mic in my iphone 8+. Absolutely quiet, with lots of sound dampening materials in the car upholstery and cloth seats of our Ford Fusion. Clean and dry as a bone.
Vocals melodies are completely written and now it's just a matter of finishing the lyrics and then recording the vocals. The Shure records at 24 bits, 48 Hz, and sounds way better than I thought a mic that plugs into a phone would sound.
I'm sure even the basement "noisy" tracks would sound okay in a mix, but that background-noise shit bugs the heck out of me, even though I'm just a mad scientist in his basement lab rocking it out. With a noisy family! (Is there any other kind?) God forbid I should have a guest vocalist come into the studio. "Come on out to the car and let's do vocals!"
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The SONG and its DEEP Meaning
"Snow Day in Hell" is about a guy who meets a girl, only the girl doesn't like the guy, jokes that he has a snowball's chance in hell with her. He hangs out with her anyway because at least that's a CHANCE!, wins her over with his superior awesomeness (probably his humor--certainly not his/my abs!), and she wants to take him home with her. In a sexual way.
He sees that he has more than a snowball's chance in hell--Hell has frozen over, she wants him, and it looks like it's a Snow Day in Hell.
[Sings bridge...]
Hey baby, I'm not your savior
But maybe, I am your flavor
Come over here and luv me
If you really want me
[...]
She wants to come home with me--well!
Sometimes it's a
Snow Day in HellNow that's the kind of masterful writing a Master's in English will get you! Especially slant-rhyming savior ("savya") and flavor (Flavah") together--it helps if you sing it with a British accent.
(I'm such a hack!)
I had a whole bit about storming the gates of Hell and looking for someone to follow my Glorious Leadership into Battle, freezing the whole place down with...FREEDOM!! or some shite. Suddenly I'm Milton or Virgil or Lucifer, or fighting Lucifer, or now I'm Spawn and ripping off the Bible and Todd McFarlane.
I decided that no one wants to hear about mythical battles with demons and angels--or rather, that shit is cool but it made this song go over into Prog Rock or Death Metal (the vocals, anyway) when it wanted to be about trying to get laid. I went with the universal human struggle of trying to get laid, rather than Plumbing the Dark Depths of the Tentacle God in His Swamps of Shuggeroth. It could have gone either way.
But there's 3-4 verses to write of this Boys Meets Girl crap:
She says: No way; no sale!
You know: A Snow Day in Hell
She's hot but I've got
A shot--not a lot [Moves happen or something. To be Mused and continued]
She's going home with me--well
Sometimes it's A Snow Day in HellOk, that's enough lyrical punishment.
--On a mythic quest for the "Clean and Dry" vocals, in the "City of Cthulhu and his spawn that built the great green stone city of R'lyeh on the great sunken continent of Mu, before it was destroyed by Ythogtha." Or a scene at the pool hall. Either way.
--Sir Hack-a-Lot