New musical challenge

Had a fun day today, working on a track with Baba Brinkman – the rapper/poet behind The Rap Canterbury Tales, one of my favourite shows from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Having met at the show, and heard a fantastic rap he’d written for his brother, Erik. After they came to see my show, we decided it’d be cool to try a track together, and as the one for Erik had no track yet, I was offered the chance to take it on.

So Baba came round today to record the vocal – we took a few passes at it, with just a drum loop from the Kaoss pad as a click track. First challenge was finding a working XLR cable – did that eventually – then got the mic wired into the computer. It’s amazing how fast you can forget the shortcuts for a particular programme – I’ve not used Audition for a couple of months, so was a little rusty navigating it, but we got three takes, the last one of which is going to make up most of the track.

And now I’ve got to construct a track around it. challenge number one was when I came to sync up the drums from FL Studio, I’d looped the Kaoss drums slightly out tune. 5 minutes of calculator crunching and some good ole fashioned trial and error, and I’ve found the proper tempo for the track (89.68bpm, if you’re taking notes), and we’re all set, with FL Studio running as a Rewire plugin in Audition so I can do all the audio recording in Audition, and all the sequencing in FLS.

So at the moment, I’ve knocked up a basic drum track to work to, and have been getting an inspiring vocal sound (which, though I say it myself, I’m doing rather a good job of).

This is going to be a really fun project – I do so little beat-related stuff, and I really ought to do more, so we’ll see how we get on. I might even try and MIDI up the Echoplex to the computer so that I can record a load of looping stuff along with it and see how we get on…

SoundtrackBruce Cockburn, ‘You’ve Never Seen Everything’ (was reading a review of this from an old copy of Third Way Magazine, written by Martyn Joseph, and had forgotten just how good it is.)

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