while there's precious little that I hope ever sees the light of day, there were a few and I do mean very few, extremely coarse rough diamonds in the mountains of coal that are my recordings. And that's probably an insult to coal

The majority of these sessions are just spaghetti sessions, I plug in with no real plan just throw it on the wall and see what sticks. Mostly it's trying to get comfortable with the act of recording, trying to lose the dreaded 'red light freeze up' syndrome. To that end I believe I've pretty much succeeded. I'm getting to the point where it is like muscle memory. Cables here, there, open this, set that, turn the input gain knob, do a final check of the guitar's tuning and I'm off to the races. Throwing down track after track is becoming second nature.

Now the fun begins. I've been working with sheet music, attempting to turn dots and lines on paper into songs that are recognizable. The sheet music is only part of the story. Guitars doubling parts, adding harmonies and counterpoints, fills, leads.

I have a bass but I know spit all about drums. I can put in a drum track from Logic Pro X. They tend to be 8 bars long and I can duplicate them to fit a track of what length I want. That's about it. I don't know the language of drums like I know strings. As a result my drum tracks sound like what they are, machine loops.

Getting a drum kit is only a lottery win away, because I'd have to have an isolated property far from people and/or build a studio a la PC's nice set up. Sweet but not likely to happen. But we'll see what next year brings if my brother and I end up buying a place. Until that happens, if anybody knows a resource that can teach you how to edit drum loops so they don't sound so much like, well, loops ... I'm all ears.

I wasn't sure whether to post this here or in The Whammy Bar.