{"id":35,"date":"2005-04-05T23:16:06","date_gmt":"2005-04-06T07:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbueno.com\/wp\/meisakuki\/2005\/04\/05\/when_the_scars_have_healed_the_wounds\/"},"modified":"2005-04-05T23:16:06","modified_gmt":"2005-04-06T07:16:06","slug":"when_the_scars_have_healed_the_wounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/2005\/04\/05\/when_the_scars_have_healed_the_wounds\/","title":{"rendered":"When the scars have healed the wounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight is one of those nights when I’d like to find the little druggie shits who burglarized my apartment in 1998 and beat the living crap out of them.
\nI spent the last two nights reconstructing “Hear the Wind Sing”, the first song I wrote using my 4-track recorder as much as my MIDI workstation. I’m definitely proud of this song, the least for which I used a 4-track recorder to make what essentially required 24 tracks.
\nI bounced a lot of stuff around and came up with a very thick, dissonant work that came close to the kind of music I hear in my head.
\nIt was easy to control the recorder, to record a track backward if I wanted to achieve an effect, to boost one part over another, to mix down a gaggle of voices to one track, to sift a synthesizer through a distortion pedal.
\nI got what I was looking for pretty quickly. At the same time, I knew a 4-track recorder to realize something that needed six times as room wasn’t going to cut it.
\nBut in the interim, the masters from which this song was created were stolen in the burglary. I couldn’t even begin to touch this song again without the capability to record multi-track.
\nWell, I had enough foresight back in 2000 to buy myself Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 as a birthday gift, knowing that while it wasn’t ProTools, it would one day help me get back what I lost.
\nSo for the last two nights, I reconstructed as best I could the song and all its elements. (I’m missing a set of “Japanese voices” because that source tape also got stolen, and there aren’t any Japanese radio stations in Austin.)
\nAnd man — it needs much, much more work.
\nThe biggest challenge is backmasking. I have a synthesizer effect called “Metal FX”. It makes a big whoosh!<\/em> at the start, then fades away. On the 4-track, I recorded the effect backward so it would make a crescendo effect when played forward. I could easily time the beginning and end of the effect by listening to other tracks playing in reverse.
\nIt’s not the same with Cakewalk.
\nI’ve had to record the effect forward, reverse the digital audio, line it up with the rest of the tracks, then decide whether I liked it. It’s a tedious process. And I dislike the amount time I have to spend on it, knowing there’s any easier way to do it.
\nThere’s a patch on my original K4 — the one that got stolen — that somehow isn’t included in the Sysex dump I grabbed from Kawai. And it’s a patch that’s very central to another song I wrote a long time ago. I’m not sure what it’s called or whether I can even find it. But it has a better timbre — a better feel — than the substitute I’m using for it.
\nOnce the digital audio elements are completed, I have to go back and fix the levels — I could do that on the fly with the 4-track, but with digital, I have to program that manually. I also have to do the same with the MIDI. Some of the parts that were meant to be background are just too loud.
\nIn short, I have to go through a far more rigorous process than I had to with the 4-track.
\nAnd while it’s a creative challenge, it’s also very tedious.
\nI dislike tedium.
\nAnd that’s why I’d like to kick the asses of the little druggie shits who burglarized my apartment in 1998.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And that’s why I’d like to kick the asses of the little druggie shits who burglarized my apartment in 1998.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkir-z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}