Artificial insemination

Had a pretty good week working on music. When we went to visit the in laws last week the stupid cat scratched my thumb so I didn't play guitar for the first half of the week because I was letting my finger heal. Instead I read some songwriting books and worked with the four track recorder iPhone app to try and come up with some melodies for this one song I'm working on. On Friday my finger had healed up, and I got back into playing again. I stayed up late Friday night, trying to record a decent version of Thirteen which didn't go so well. First of all, I decided not to record using the built in iSight camera from the side as I don't like my profile much. Also, I couldn't get a good recording despite the fact I had both mics going at once. I blame this later on for bad levels on the Duet interface, and also the MXL 2001 condenser mic just being crappy in general. I got really frustrated with this mic and I eventually wound up ordering an MXL 990 - which is cheap but gets really good reviews as a vocal an acoustic guitar mic. I'm going to try recording again when I get the 990 later this week. And probably my biggest problem - vocal problems due to my trying to sing the song lower so that it fits comfortably within my 'range'. I realized some songs are meant to be sung just slightly above a singer's comfort level as it gives the vocal performance a bit of an 'edge', so long as the singer can control his voice the majority of the time. My voice isn't really that far off from E. Smith anyways - and also, if you're going to go down an octave then the shakiness of the really low notes becomes the problem. On Saturday and Sunday - I played a *lot* of acoustic, and I was able to sing a lot of the time. Excited at how my singing and playing seems to have improved, and how I'm getting more comfortable with it. Also excited about how the time off seems to have helped my playing - sometimes it's good to take some time off from playing - anyways, playing was good. I made up for the practice time lost the past couple weeks during the holidays and I even added a bunch of new songs to the repertoire.