to spin inside dull aberrations (raw mix)

so, this is what i'm working on this week.

it's another song from 2001, but it was written to be a stadium rock anthem, which is dramatically different than the other things i was doing at the time. the change in direction was due to working with a guitarist that was into more conventional, aggressive rock music and wanted to start a band.

that band never actually happened, and as a result the song never really got completed.

i don't have scores of this, but i do have the original drum tracks. there's going to be two mixes. the raw mix is what it would have sounded like if you were eavesdropping on me in my basement over the summer of 2001. i write so much stuff on guitar, and then take it in so many weird directions. the result is that a lot of the actual songs get lost in these hazes of production and weirdness. i've decided i should try and create as many of these stripped down guitar mixes as i can, to actually get the songs down somewhere. at the end of the day, there's going to be an audience that isn't going to be able to handle the 35 minute version of these things with 15 minutes of psychedelic loops but may enjoy the raw, seven minute psych punk version. if you see what i'm saying.

the second will be the fully complete track, which i'll be doing over the course of the month.

this raw guitar & drums mix is an accurate representation of what the track sounded like as i was writing it in my basement over the summer of 2001. this contains one guitar part with no overdubs.

track written summer of 2001. drums from 2001. guitar recorded aug 3, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/raw-mix

stress

it was requested that i record this as the "secret song" for the record. as it turns out, it was the only song that was recorded at all...

written and recorded, 1999-2001. this recording did not happen until mid 2001, but i was playing it at parties months before that. this file has not been altered from the 2001 recording.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/stress

the raw track'll be up soon.

but that goddamn microtone is just so evasive....nothing came out of it, but i made the right choice all those years ago...

yeah, this is working out just fine.

my philosophy over the ten years this has been broken has been "don't fuck with it, so long as it works". just going to stick with it...

i need a bit more tone than i'm used to, but the track calls for it, anyways.

yeah. i'm not going to get a good result by popping a precut nut into this thing, it's going to mess with the string spacing. i mean, that might be beneficial or might be negative but the key is that it's not the way the guitar was designed.

i'll head down there some time during the week and see if they either have the part or if i can order it from them (i apparently can't order from epiphone).

if i can't, and it's still bugging me, i'll actually pay for somebody to shape a blank nut. i have some extra cash this month and that's money well spent...

for now, i actually think i can probably bang this out alright.

worst case, i'll have to sit there with the old nut and try and sand the new one down to emulate it, but i'm not particularly confident that it's even possible given the spacing.

well, it's far from perfect, but it wasn't to begin with and it does seem to have set a bit.

it sounds sort of weird, but i actually want to replace it with the cheapy stock plastic nut that they're shipped with. it's just a question of normalizing the issue, and that's the best way to do it. if that doesn't fix it, i may want to experiment with shaping something, but if i swap a different nut and it continues to buzz then i can't really know if it's still the nut or if it's the tension in the neck. that's important because adjusting truss rods needs to be a last resort. taking it back to the "factory defaults" will help me get a proper grasp on the issue.

i'm not convinced this is possible to do, though. grargh. i guess if i *can't* get the stock nut, i'll have to go back and get the one they had....

i was very tired yesterday and didn't do much of anything.

and while i have the measurements worked out, i'm going to wait until after monday to head down to get some wood. ironically, i suspect the civic holiday may be the busiest day of the year at home depot - it's when all the bourgeois couples decide to renovate to try and fix their broken marriages. i'd rather avoid that. and, i have to wait until i get a crystal clear day to haul that much wood around, so it could be a few days.

i picked up some strings on friday because i was out that way to get some tomatoes, but i didn't get a new nut for the red guitar. they didn't really have the right part. i should probably have some spare heads around anyways, so i'm going to see if i can order the part from epiphone.

so, i'm going to try and get some work done today, but if the red guitar is still unplayable for this tune then it's going to mostly be about experimenting in trying to get the right tone out of the black guitar.