Use Everything/Waste Nothing - A 2025 Recording Update

A Change in Approach

As of my last update I was poring over old, unreleased sessions that I had tracked and had settled on working on rebuilding some old jazz sessions, overdubbing my lousy basslines and coming up with a little record to release. I'm still working on this, but although I love jazz music I'm not a jazz artist. I just don't have the chops, nor do I have the time to build them up.

However, I've come across three unreleased pop/rock records that are candidates to get finished up and finally see the light of day.

2009

2008/2009 was my last year of post-secondary school at Humber College in Toronto, and part of our program was to use the then-newly built recording studio to make some kind of an album. Being the program's first year it was a bit of a disaster organizationally speaking, but I did graduate with an original bebop tune, an original fusion tune, two pop originals, and a cover of the theme music from Hawaii Five-O (long story).

The pop tunes were tracked, mixed, and mastered, but were tragically unreleased due to my absolutely cringe-worthy lyrics. Writing lyrics is the hardest part of songwriting, and although the singer was wonderful I never could stand to listen to these two songs very much.

Much like last time I reconstituted the session in Reaper and had a listen. The drums and bass were well-played and well-recorded and I've settled on some bass and drum takes that are keepers. My guitar playing wasn't very good, my plan is to redo it all and add some additional instruments, as well as new vocals. The main challenge here is that the recording engineer didn't print the click track, so I won't have a tempo reference but I think the bass and drums are tight enough that I'll be able to make it work. The other potential hangup is that the room microphones have a little guitar bleed in them, so they may have to be discarded.

These two tunes need additional instruments added. I only played a single guitar track which doesn't really work in a stereo mix. I could just make these songs into mono mixes but I'll probably think about some more complex instrumentation and arrangements. I'm leaning towards keeping the bass tracks on these ones.

2017

I did another pop recording eight years ago, getting four songs tracked, but once again my downfall was the lyrical content. I actually completed the creative process on one of the tunes, seeing it through to mixing and mastering before giving up.

I've started with this song (titled "Can't Undo Me"), once again parsing through the audio files and rebuilding the song track by track in the DAW. This process was a bit more tedious because the recordist used a lot more mics on the drums but I've got it sorted out now, and as a bonus he printed the metronome click track so overdubbing new parts should be a breeze. Once again due to tracking live in less than ideal isolation means that the room mics capturing the drums may have to be discarded, although when I create new parts the bleed may end up being masked as it's very faint.

I played both bass and guitar on this record, and will probably end up redoing both instruments, as well as adding some new stuff. Probably weird sounds. This one was recorded in a now-defunct studio called Candle located in Toronto's Junction Triangle neighbourhood.

2015

This record is sonically complete and the one I'm most proud of but will unfortunately never see the light of day due to hurt feelings. The shortish version of the band drama is that from 2013-2014 I played bass in a local band that focused on originals. We never played very well but managed to write ten or eleven tunes before breaking up. The problems arose when the singer decided that the tunes were her intellectual property and began playing them with a new band she had recruited. Unaware of this, I decided that I wanted to document four of our best songs and so booked a studio, hired a few friends from college, and made it happen. The singer was furious when she found out. Although it kills me not to have these songs out in the world I've decided that leaving it unreleased is the better part of valour. This was pretty upsetting to me back in the day as with the exception of one song our songwriting process was very much a group approach and I felt that the tunes deserved to have everybody's name on them. What can I say, we were young. :)

I might go back and rebuild the drum tracks to make something new, but this is last on my list, both because the record is complete and because of the potential headaches involved. I've called this one "The Forbidden Songs" because it amuses me to do so.

New Sounds

I love making records! Given that the drum tracks aren't changing the song structures are basically locked down. I have no desire to quantize the performances and start looping sections. This is a legitimate approach to making music but it's not my thing, I prefer the more organic sound of a band grooving together. I especially enjoy the interplay of the bassist and the drummer on my 2009 date, which is a vibe that is impossible to achieve when everything is quantized/gridded/pasted and auto-tuned. Although 2009 and 2017 were tracked by two different engineers in two different rooms and with different equipment (the early date was done into a monster forty-eight channel SSL console!) the drum sounds are excellent and well worth keeping. It's a fun challenge to write a song with a predefined form, and sometimes constraints can actually aid the creative process rather than be a hinderance. I'm excited to knock these two projects out and see what I can come up with, and I'm glad to be salvaging the sessions and putting them out to the world rather than letting them waste away on my hard drive.