Monday, July 13, 2020

Blackberry Break

Lovely blackberries. In season, they have an after-kick of Ribena flavour that is absolutely lush. Excuse me for being swanky, but the first time I went to New York two years ago I half-lived off blackberries from the street corner stalls near Central Park. A box or two of those, and I was ready to roll.
In the hedgerows up here they are almost ripe, which means I'll get fat. The wild ones are so sour you have to put them in a blackberry pudding, and that means lots of picking, lots of pudding, lots of eating, lots of fatting.
This is my ears-break of the afternoon. I did some work this morning but I'm a bit stuck now because my computer is filling up with work stuff. I'm trying to arrange to collect the one from work, Big Bad Brenda, so I can stick all the work on to that one and free up this one for music.
I'm going to have to do some audio homework. To my ears, my vocals catch a certain tone at a certain pitch that is a bit like a punch on the eardrum. I can't find the Hz when I'm equalising it to stop it from happening, so I need to do a bit of research because that's not a good thing.
Likewise (or not) I need to be able to take some of the muddiness out of the guitar without it sounding thin and tinny.
Looking on the bright side, I'm finding the SM58 absolutely perfect for vocals; it fixes all sorts of things even before you get the sound on to the hard drive. I think maybe expensive microphones are made so you can mix the voice with a lot of popifying plugins.
Or maybe I'm just a cheap date. Likewise (or not, again) having a guitar with great pickups means that there's a character in the sound of the guitar without me having to add lots of things to it to make it work.
OK! Back to work. Quick tune-up of the guitar, wipe the rust off the strings.
Another 45 minutes before my ears give up and add a tinnitus twang to the song!

1 comment:

Wilky of St Albans said...

You want blackberries? I know where the sweetest are. But I'm not telling.