The Cost of Recording

I'm a musician...sort've. I don't make any money off of it, but I play in a band and I launched a solo project about a month ago. I have a website with a blog and all that jazz and I would normally post this kind of music-related biznazz there. The thing is, this little rant is going to be about someone local, someone known, and I don't want to burn any bridges before I've built them, you know what I mean? So I'm just gonna go ahead and separate this out so I can get it off my chest but still maintain relations in case I need them again in the future. In the short term I have no intention of working with him again, but you never know what's going to happen.

When I decided to launch this new music project I had this great idea. I was going to release a single month. It would be a good way to keep people engaged, prevent them from burning out on the same old tune and losing interest. I happened to have a bunch of professionally recorded tracks that I'd done a couple of years ago. Wifey got me some studio time with a friend of ours who has a studio in town, and I went in with my guitar and laid down rhythm and vocals, had the dude from my band come in and play bass, and then had some local college kid do drums. I recorded like 6 or 7 songs during this time. They were essentially done and all I needed was some lead guitar work. I had asked a friend of mine to do it and he agreed, but he kept putting me off and finally the whole project just languished. When I re-committed myself to a solo project I thought, Cool, I have a bunch of pro tracks to start off with. I'll just play the leads myself. I planned to do a combination of releasing the professionally recorded ones and home-recorded demos of new songs.

There was a small snag in my plan though. Upon re-listening to the previously recorded tracks, it became clear that the dude with whom I'd initially recorded either had a tin ear (which I feel like he didn't because his other shit sounds pretty good), or just didn't really give a damn. The guitar was so badly out of tune it made me wince to go back and listen. I remember recording an EP with my band, using this guy (let's call him Scarf, because he wore a scarf one time) who has a studio in the same building as our practice space and having him flat out replace my guitar with one of his own to play because it didn't sound very good. That's a producer, and it makes sense. It's what I'd expect. I'm going to release these recordings and tell everyone that you recorded and produced them. It's in your best interest to make them sound good. For whatever reason that didn't happen with my initial recordings. I never told the dude either because I have no backbone. At any rate, I now found myself in a position of having to re-record all of the guitar, and some of the vocals too.

I decided to work with Scarf. He was a known, I liked the work he did on our EP, and he was conveniently located. No-brainer. I sent him the tracks I had and said, "Tell me what I need to do to make these sound good." His assessment? That much of it was unusable. He didn't think the drums were mic'd very well and therefore they lacked good levels, and he agreed that my guitar was out of tune. He said it would cost me more money to have him try and massage all of that into something listenable (and it still wouldn't be great) than it would be for us to start over. He would use what he could, but in the interest of quality replace whatever didn't rate.

Why I Ditched the Nexus 5

I wanted the Nexus 5. I wanted it so badly. I had finally paid off my Samsung S3 and decided to go for it. Over the years I've learned a little something about being a consumer though so I did my due diligence before dropping $350 plus shipping and some accessories on Google Play. There were a few things that gave me pause about the device.

• 16GB internal storage with no microSD slot. (I know I could buy the 32GB version, but still)
• Non-replaceable battery
• Reportedly inferior camera/video, especially the front-facing camera (although I typically don't even use the front-facing camera, so...)
• Reports of low volume on playback

Despite these concerns I was really drawn by the prospect of having a vanilla Android install to do with as I please, so I went for it. I ordered it and waited for its arrival eagerly. Of course, a day after ordering it I checked on its status and realized I had mistakenly ordered the white version instead of the black one. Whoops. No worries; a case would cover that up anyway. 

I got the device and it was as glorious as I'd anticipated. It felt light and thin in my hands, despite being taller than my S3. Startup was a cinch. My apps downloaded from the Play store, I used a 3rd party app to pull over some other apps and files from old phone, and enjoyed exploring the new version of Android. I really dug the ability to say "Okay Google" and have it ready to do my bidding. "Okay, Google, make me dinner!" That didn't work obviously, but it was still a lot of fun to play with. I never use Siri on my iPad but I could see myself using this feature a lot. 

I was about 3 days in to my exploration when the bottom dropped out. Lying in bed, I decided to set up Spotify and give it a listen. I played a song that's been on repeat for me for a few days now, "Sweet Nothing" by Calvin Harris feat. Florence Welch.  It was, without question, awful. The high end was incredibly present, the sound overall tinny and weak. I played with the equalizer in Spotify and set it to exactly the same as my S3 and was blown away by the difference in sound quality. That alone was a deal breaker for me. I'm sure I could have looked around online for some software to tweak the sound, but that was more trouble than I wanted to go through for something that I think should have been better out of the box. I even had Wifey listen to it—she's not known for having a particularly discriminating ear—and even she was shocked by how bad it was. I made the decision then and there to box it up and go get an S5. 

Overall I'm happy enough with the S5, but setting it up made me miss the simplicity of the Nexus 5. The most stand-out differences:

• The S5 is huge in comparison. Hell, it's huge compared to the S3. I actually struggle a little to get my thumb across the width of it.
• The EULAs. So many legal agreements about the software. I felt like I was selling my soul off with the agreements to not alter my phone, and to let Samsung or T-Mobile collect data for "performance purposes". Sure. 
• So much included software that I neither want nor care about, and no way to uninstall it. At best I can disable the stuff. That's better than before I suppose, but I can't remove/disable all of it, so there're still background processes running that I don't need or want. That's as frustrating as it ever was. 

If Google could throw a better audio processor in there, I'd have been happy as shit. As it is, I use my phone for listening to music a lot, so there was no compromising on this front.