If everybody had kept their promises, I’d be in Colorado this morning. Instead, I was at the bakery and finally met my Hungarian princess. She’s tall, blonde, athletic and that denotes a fortress which cannot be taken by storm. Later, I found out the moat was her mother. Diplomacy is the art of letting the other person believe everything was their own idea, and who’s better at that? We’ll see, as I quietly worked the Sunday crossword. That’s my care package behind my coffee, the goodies they give me until they re-open Tuesday morning.
As per blog rules, weather and medical only get mention when they are the top news, and it is 94.5 degrees out there, equaling 109 on the heat index. It is 98 in the Florida room, where I am but I have five fans operating to keep things Mediterranean. If I watched TV, I’m certain this weather is being talked to death, so let’s move on.The Boss recorder is a clunker, requiring too much patience for the average user. I’d say most people use only the basics and I’ve already found raw input has to be coupled to sound patches (think of special effects). Unlike the Tascam, direct input does not sound right. Also not mentioned in Boss literature is the BR-600 is specifically geared to the singing guitarist. All others must find a way to work around these default settings.
I may have discovered a way to work the Boss files with a real editor. It involves exporting the tracks one by one and realigning/recombining them with Audacity. That’s my challenge for this hot, hot afternoon. The only other export option is to do what Boss calls a “master” which obliterates the tracks along with any option of adjusting them. See you later, when I get back from this tricky experiment.
Yes, exporting can be done but with such rigorous effort , I balked. Alternatively, I exported four copies of each trial file. Not bad. Then, with my new-found expertise, I went back and created a fifth copy. This is the copy my competition definitely does NOT want to know about. It’s a curiously expert sounding backup section missing only the bass part. In other words, it is the one job I’ve failed to find a guitarist (or band) to do for the past half-decade. It is live without those sterile midi exactitudes. And they said it couldn’t be done.
Guess what? It sounds great, even with my third rate rhythm guitar, and that makes sense because heroes focus on lead instead of solid chops. Next is something I could not have predicted when I was thirteen, when I single-handedly started my first band despite vicious parental and small town opposition. It’s this: I can play each instrument without sounding “indie”. I’ll explain.
I’ve always disliked Internet originals because I can tell every track is played by the same guitarist. It is sounds purposely held back to be subordinate to the guitar every boring damn time. Ah, but do we know anyone who by age thirteen had learned each instrument without being a guitarist? I think I paid my dues, type of thing.
I don’t take back anything I’ve said about the Boss, it is still crappy. It can’t remember effects settings by the channel and they disappear anyway if you turn the machine off. The songs are named and numbered differently than the backup files. Recording steps, which should be the easiest functions, have to be carefully memorized. To make a point, what you are hearing is frustration, not confusion.
It seems to take around two hours to create each set of tracks and I’ll need 32 of them. I can sing 25 songs now. The last five (like Margaritaville) are shaky but progressing. I’ll comb my files for the balance, but each addition becomes musically more complicated and more difficult.
[Author's note 2016: four years later I can only sing 20 songs. But you should hear me sing them now. And this time, I'm playing guitar.]
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
