Well, I finally built my Christmas Album. I decided that it was now or never, so I just took all of Thanksgiving vacation to knock it out. I had thought that it would be pretty easy, since the "Waltzing With Bears" CD went pretty quick, but it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare.
One problem is that I don't do the Christmas songs nearly as often as I do the kids' songs, so I can't play 'em mistake-free in a take or two. In fact, some of 'em, I can't play (and sing) mistake-free at all. It's usually better to play and sing at the same time, but on songs that were hard or unfamiliar, I had to resort to playing the guitar part first, and singing over it in a separate take.
So I did a few songs with both parts together, and a few with them separate. And then my amplifier died (I need two amps (mine and the Princess one) to do two parts), so I was stuck doing all the rest of the songs in two takes, even if they were easy. That's not *so* bad, but it meant that the vocals had moved from the new amp to the old amp, which has a totally different effects (reverb) processor, and in the process of playing with all of the dead amp's knobs to try to revive it, I lost the bass and treble settings. So the reverb and EQ settings were completely different between the pre- and post-amp-death recordings.
Individually, the songs didn't sound too bad (probably since I'm not much of a "sound guy", so I don't know no better), but strung in a sequence (say, on a CD), they were desperately different-sounding. I wasted a bunch of time (this is weeknight evenings, by now) trying to modify the separate tracks' recordings to match each other, but it was mainly no-go. So I had to re-record half the vocal tracks (which were actually probably improved for it).
Then I spent the rest of the week listening to test CDs in my car on the way to and from work, just trying to get them all to sound at about the same volume. Since they were all done with different methods, on different amps, with different settings, and even different microphones, they were at all different volume levels. Anyway, enough whining -- I learned one Important Lesson: choose a method, and stick to it. (That's why the "Bears" CD went so easy -- it was all done the same way.)
But after all that, I'm mostly proud of most of it. I think the main flaw is that it's all me, all the time -- and it gets monotonous, literally. I tried to vary the sound, but, like John Hartford said, "Style is based on limitation".
To add *some* kind of variety, I dragged my old bass out and added a bass line to "Blue Christmas". Originally, Warren was gonna do me a lead solo verse, but he got too busy, so I got out my swap meet electric guitar and figured one out for myself. I think that's the thing I'm most proud of on the whole CD -- only because I've never played lead guitar, ever, so I have no idea how to do it. But I just played the song over and over while fiddling around on the electric, and some kind of thing emerged. Not sure how good it is in the grand scheme, but I like it. So I'm on that track four times: guitar, bass, vocal, and lead.
Somewhere I got the notion that my mom really likes "Silver Bells". I don't usually do that one, 'cuz it really requires the vocal harmony. But on the CD I could double track myself, so it worked. And I put in the "chimes" with the electric guitar (although it took me a zillion tries to get it (mostly), 'cuz they go by so fast), so I'm on that track 4 times, too.
On "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas", I was trying to add *something*, 'cuz it's pretty repetitive. First I tried to add autoharp, but even though it sounded pretty good live, the mic only picks up the "jangle-ness", and none of the actual, like, notes. It made it sound like one of those Gamelan bands from Java. Cool maybe, but not exactly what I was going for. So I scratched that idea, and got Acacia's cello out. Took me a while to learn how to play it well enough, but I got the hang of it, mostly, and mixed that track kind of quiet.
On the last song, "I'll Be Home for Christmas", it was clearly too short (like most of 'em), and it's just one verse repeated twice, so it was just begging for an instrumental verse in-between. The original recording I'd done was pretty good, so I split it in two and inserted a new guitar-only verse, and then added an electric guitar "solo" on top of that. I just played a slightly-ornamented version of the real tune, though -- no made-up solo this time.
Anyway, if you're reading this and don't have a copy of the CD:
(A) Who are you?!?
(B) There are MP3s at http://68.5.108.28:2222/DISK%201/Christmas%20album/MP3s/
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