I just realised you can automate the pedal board in garage band. That is so cool!

Did some vocal and drum takes at home today on that song I've been working on for months. Few observations.

Vocal Levels

I've been trying to get the right vox sound / level for a long time. I've played with singing close and getting a lot of detail, but also a lot of breathing and mouth noises, and this isn't meant to be ASMR.

Then I tried singing far back, but you lose the volume and you end up needing to gain it up. And I try every place in between.

Today I did the room sound thing, with the recording level all the way up, and I put my beanie in front of the mic to act as a kind of pop guard when I got closer.

I'm only using GarageBand, and I don't like how the volume automation limits you from using the volume slider for each track later (it locks it). So I just split the track by loud/soft parts and manually level them. I know this is really dumb but I like to tweak levels so much and GarageBand's automation is all or nothing. Maybe I'm missing something.

Late Kick

For the drums. I noticed my kick is usually a bit early in this song. And I couldn't get it right, no matter what I did. It really frustrated me because while I was playing I felt I was on the beat and everything else was on the beat, but the kick was just a bit off.

I couldn't figure out why this was happening now but not before, then I realised - I just got new shoes. Then I went on a big google and found a lot of drummers play in socks, so I thought I'd try that. On these little fiddly pedals on this toy kit it didn't really work, the pedal kept moving around. Eventually I went to my old shoes and my beat wasn't off anymore. So somewhere in my brain I've managed to add the necessary delay for the sole of the shoe vs the sole of my foot, I don't know, it's a mystery to me.

Playing Straight

I've been working on the drums in the solo/breakdown section. I came up with this pretty cool tom pattern and practiced it endlessly for days. But after the drama with getting the kick to stay on beat I thought I'd just play straight through the whole section and maybe work on it later as a separate layer. I'm also getting tired of working on this song so I thought I'd maybe have a basic drum track and move on. Thing was, playing straight sounded better. And I noticed listening back, whenever I went to the toms from the crash/ride it sounded hollow or empty. So I just alternated between open high hat, crash and ride but played pretty straight and I think it worked.

Playing Drums without the Click

I noticed I like where the drums fall better when I play off click. So tried playing off click and turned the click back on when listening to hear my errors. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this approach but it just felt more like the drums were playing with the other instruments instead of being a robot.

Real DAW?

There's a few small things that bug me about GarageBand. And I think I should stick with it for a while longer just to keep productive and not get distracted. But I'm starting to watch videos on different DAWs and so far Reaper looks pretty interesting to me.