Saturday, June 25, 2011

Secret Side Quest

I've seemed to neglect our weekly hiatus updates, taking the concept of weekly very loosely.  We are currently working on a supplemental feature for Chord du Jour that would make our current weekly song goal a bit more interesting, and it would perhaps kick-start what I really wanted to do when we started the Jam Session podcast:  Giveaways and contests!

Other than saying we're working on something, all the details are a bit secret, but we'll reveal this stuff...soon!

Keep on jammin'.

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Thursday, June 16, 2011

Streamlining the Production Process with Templates

We've used Pro Tools as our digital audio workstation of choice for about the past five years.  While every little project should, theoretically, have its own unique approach, we're in the process of creating music as quickly as possible.  So, to do this, we have made a basic template of tracks used for every project:

We've earmarked a few tracks for drums;
We have a couple mono tracks for guitars;
We have one track for bass;
We have a few stereo tracks for synths (if any);
We have kept several available for vocals.

We have also specified basic inputs, buses, and plug-ins for each template track.

We've saved this template as its own file.  Whenever we create a new Pro Tools project, all we have to do is import the tracks (which otherwise have no data in them) from the template file to the current project.  Almost instantly, we're ready to rock -- just add music.

Hopefully this song-a-week project will be realized sooner than later.  Cheers!

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Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Weekly Updates (Temporarily)

Quickly recording actual songs, as opposed to spur-of-the-moment, single-progression jam sessions, is taking longer than we'd like.  So far we're tracking the drums to the songs that have already been written (and they've been written quickly).  Once the drums are in, building the track with basslines, guitars, vocals, etc., will be fun.  It'll take some time, but it'll be fun!

Once we are a couple of finished songs in, we'll restart Chord du Jour on a daily basis, with new songs posted about every Wednesday (or a rerun Jam Session...whatever).

Please stay tuned!



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