Working Title

Category: Recording

  • Anatomy of a song – Sun Tunnels “I Guess Not”

    Eds. note: this post is the third in a series of posts about songs from my last EP.

    A theme I’m playing with in my latest EP Old Haunts Volume 1, and for that matter any other volumes I might make, is how recordings can collect pieces of sound or ideas from different places and times and then mix them together into one moment. “I Guess Not” is in some ways the newest song on the EP and in other ways not so much.


    It began as a microcassette scratch recording of guitar and melody from May 2003. I have tons of these “proto-songs,” but since tapes are an annoying medium I didn’t listen back to most of them until months or years later while at the same time capturing them in digital form, at which point I would decide if they had anything good in them or not.

    Most of these proto-songs are very bad but some will have a hook or at least something interesting going on. Among this subset most don’t become fully realized songs, but a few like “I Guess Not” do. An even smaller subset of those go on to become “real” recordings.

    I started this recording in September 2008 in a practice space with drummer Terry Kyte, who was in Open Choir Fire at the time. I had sent him a demo a few days earlier, then we met up I think in their space on Capitol Hill and ran through a couple of takes with me on guitar and him on drums. His part and performance were awesome.

    I think that practice space used to be here

    A couple of months later my friend and erstwhile bandmate Sugar McGuinn came to my house and recorded bass on top of what Terry and I had done. He also played a few takes and was great.

    Then nothing. I think in my head it had been a good attempt but not worth pursuing, either because I didn’t mic the drums well, or because I didn’t like the lyrics much, or because I didn’t get a good guitar take. So it sat on a hard drive for years and years… til last Summer, when I was looking for recordings to finish and came across it again.

    At the time my wife and I had recently become a “waiting couple” for adoption, and one piece of advice we got was to find projects to work on while waiting. I picked “finish some old recordings and put out an EP as Sun Tunnels” as one project. Also I started occasionally running around Greenlake while the weather was nice, and I’d listen to mp3s of stuff while running to decide what was worth working on and what specifically needed to happen to finish each song.

    “I Guess Not” needed new lyrics, a second guitar to join (and partly cover up) the one I’d recorded along with Terry (the guitar and drums bled together in the audio and so couldn’t really be separated), maybe some harmony vocals, an instrumental solo of some kind during the interlude, and better mixing.

    In the end it got all of those things, as best as I could. Lyrically I kept some of the original lines from what I wrote in 2008 (or whenever it was) but bent them toward a new theme. I think the song now is about smartphones and how weirdly hypnotized we are by them in a way that might seem extremely strange to an observer from 2008. I think about it most every day on the bus how weird it is. We’re all staring at our hands.

  • Anatomy of a song – Sun Tunnels “Fruit Fly”

    In 2001 I wrote a song called “Fruit Fly” and then recorded it in 2008, here it is now:

    This is its story.

    I built it on an A chord shape with embellishments that follow the main vocal melody, which transitions to A7 and D for the bridge, then G and D for the chorus. Not actually those chords since I tune down a whole step, but those shapes.

    I have a memory of playing it at the Red and Black cafe in Portland in 2001 and two women at a table telling me they liked it. I looked like this at the time.

    I still wear that shirt to do yard work

    “Fruit Fly” dropped off my set shortly after and I don’t think I played it for a while. I remembered it in early 2008 apparently as that’s when I started recording it in my rented Madrona basement.

    For the recording I did some things I usually don’t. I didn’t want to bother the neighbors so I kept things quiet in that house — no drums, no loud amps — unlike at our previous place in Wedgwood where our neighbors didn’t seem to care. Anyway, for “Fruit Fly” I tried programming drums and using an amp simulator for the guitars. I used this thing:

    But I think just for the amp simulation, and used other effects boxes for overdrive and delay.

    I recorded lots of guitar parts and then spent time editing and mixing them so they did interesting things without competing too much with the vocals. The main/rhythm guitar part, i.e., that simple chord progression with embellishments with which I played the song solo, has a delay on it here to give it a driving kind of quality.

    The long outro guitar solo was new, I never did that before the recording. I think I was listening to a lot of Tears for Fears at the time so I like to think that part was inspired by them somehow. Maybe?

    I programmed the drums using Sonar’s MIDI “piano roll” which is kind of awkward but it worked. I used samples of the drums from when I recorded Andrea Maxand’s “Here Comes the Revolution” for Ball of Wax #4. This was a bit interesting because I used one mic for that and so the kick and snare samples both have a lot of hi-hat in them. Old timers call that “bleed.” Bleed.

    piano roll. Worst sushi ever

    For bass, I thought I’d try programming that too, so it’s also a piano roll MIDI composition. I borrowed some kind of synth keyboard from my friend Sugar McGuinn and picked the “Jazz Overdrive” preset on it, set up the MIDI track to drive the keyboard and then recorded that. I’ve heard it called “printing” when you record something on one track that’s sourced from another track playing through some outboard stuff. Printing.

    bass piano roll. I see now the sushi joke would have worked better here

    Instruments and vocals were tracked between January and March 2008 and then the song was pretty much done. But it wasn’t! I put an early mix on SoundCloud in 2012 but for whatever reason I didn’t really finish it until this year 2017, when I added some handclaps, did some final mixing and then had it mastered by Rachel Field at Resonant Mastering.

    I don’t remember why the title “Fruit Fly,” I think it was a random working title that didn’t get changed. I rewrote the lyrics a few times. I think it used to be about worrying that your desires are transparently obvious and foolish so you should anticipate ridicule, and now it might still be about those things but the chorus says to not waste time worrying about that and just get on with it.

    And now it’s done. The recording sounds good to me (Rachel helped a lot) and represents the original song while also being very different from what it sounded like solo. It’s not perfect but spending any more time on it would be insane.

    What next? “Fruit Fly” is on a 5-song EP I’m finishing any second now called Old Haunts Volume 1.

    Update 2/7: I neglected to mention the EP has been out, go see it on Bandcamp.

    Update 2/16: check out a similar post for the second song, “Saturday.”

    Update 3/23: read about “I Guess Not.“

  • Cakewalk Sonar .wav import and Zoom H2

    The best thing about the Internet, maybe, is that it instantly (instantly!) provides an answer to whatever weird question you might have about whatever. When it does not provide an answer though, I get bummed out. Then I have to try to figure out whatever it is myself, and anyway I’ve got some items now to give back to the pool of knowledge.

    Here’s something weird I ran into a few weeks ago. I was using one of these:

    Zoom H2 flash recorder

    And recorded a wav (wave? WAV? it’s not clear how to spell this) at 44.1KHz 16bit. I copied the file to my PC and then imported it into Cakewalk Sonar.

    Only I didn’t. It didn’t quite import. Sonar said that it did, and the track view altered slightly (little dots in the track that weren’t there before — see the image below), and a file appeared in the project’s audio folder, but there was no visible clip in the track view. And nothing to play back. No sound.

    sonar tracks - empty and not quite
    Top: track view before import. Bottom: track view after

    So that was weird. Infuriating actually, I tried this in both X1 and 8.5 with the same result.

    I don’t know what the cause of this issue was, but the workaround I settled on was to open the wav in Audacity and then export it. I exported it as the same thing it already was, a 44.1KHz 16 bit wav — in the Audacity export options, this was “WAV (Microsoft) signed 16 bit PCM.”

    If I had to guess, which I have to since I don’t have any evidence at the moment, I would suspect that the Zoom H2 records WAVs as “Broadcast Wave Format,” which is like a normal WAVE but with metadata, and that Sonar doesn’t handle this correctly.

    So that’s one way to deal with it. If you run into this and Google sends you here, see if that does it.