I submitted some music to the Castle Crashers music contest, and, I must admit, I'm a little disappointed in how it turned out. I started out by sporadically writing parts over the course of a couple of days on my uncle Dan's acoustic guitar. I played some chords with little lead riffs in between here and there. Then I went to my computer and plotted out some drum tracks with Magix Music Maker 10 and tried to add the guitar tracks to them.

One of the problems I have when I'm recording is that I have a lot of trouble getting good recording quality. It's summer, and I don't have air conditioning in my house, so I have these fans running to keep the house cool. Ideally, you want to record in an environment that is noiseless. At first, I'd just turn off all the fans and close all the windows to make the house quiet, but after about fifteen minutes, I'd start to sweat. I decided that I'd just wait for a nice cool day to record, but the deadline started creeping up, and no cool days were coming.

In the past, I'd recorded in my garage, and that wasn't too bad, but sometimes you could hear noise from the street in the background. I decided to record in my basement, because it was nice and cool there, and it seemed as if no outside noise could get in. That was mostly true, but sometimes, someone upstairs would flush the toilet or turn on the faucet, and I'd hear the sound of water rushing through the pipes.

So I lugged my laptop, my mixer, my microphones, step stool, microphone cables, and my guitar down into the basement. At first I was recording both chords and lead riffs at the same time in the same take. But that made it seem overly complicated, and it sounded as if I was struggling to fit everything in. So I decided to record separate lead and rhythm tracks. Sometimes I'd experiment with using my uncle's guitar for the lead tracks, and my guitar for the rhythm, but that didn't sound right, so I'd switch up. Finally I decided to use my uncle's guitar for the whole thing. So I worked on that all of one day, and I couldn't really get a neat recording. I figured that it was due to my lack of practice, and I decided that, the next day, I'd be able to make a better recording, because I'd done nothing but play the song all day the previous day.

The next day I lugged all my recording equipment back down in the basement --I kept bringing it all back up at the end of the day, because rain was in the forecast, and my basement floods. My fingers were a little sore from playing so long the previous day, but part of being a guitar player is ignoring the pain in your fingertips. After awhile, I managed to record some tracks that I thought were pretty good, and after lugging all my recording equipment back upstairs, I plugged my laptop into the network, so I could transfer the sound file onto my other computer, which would allow me to listen to the recording through some larger speakers, instead of the headphones that I'd been using down in the basement.

Even though everything sounded good on the headphones, when I transfered the sound file to the other computer, the guitar parts sounded terrible, --dull-- as if I was listening to a guitar player while hiding in the bushes outside his window. As if that wasn't bad enough, I started to notice this really annoying buzzing sound every time I played something on the low E-string. I picked up my uncle's guitar and started playing the song, and, even though I hadn't noticed the buzzing before, now it sounded as annoying and painful to me as if some sort of lilliputian was chainsawing my eardrums.

I decided that maybe I should use my guitar for everything instead of my uncle's, but my guitar sounded pretty dull. It might've been because the strings are old and dead, but I don't have a whole lot of cash these days, and I wasn't able to buy new strings at that moment, because I'd spent my pay check on food, gas, and rent. After awhile, I decided that my acoustic guitar wasn't the best choice, and that meant that I'd have to record the song on my electric. I figured that my acoustic recording quality was so bad because the acoustic guitars just weren't loud enough to drown out all the sonic impurities in the air. So I dragged all my usual stuff down into the basement, this time with the addition of my electric --a Hamer Duotone hollow bodied guitar-- and my amplifier. I didn't really want to use my electric guitar, because Castle Crashers seems like a medieval game, and, even though I had drum tracks from a standard contemporary drum kit, I didn't feel as if an electric guitar would capture the folkiness that you'd need for a medieval game.

Anyway, so with my fingers blistering, I started to do take after take until I finally had some guitar tracks that I liked. Then it seemed as if, since I was using an electric guitar, that I needed to add bass, because, otherwise, it would sound very thin. So I brought my bass guitar down. I had to plug the bass right into the mixer, because I can't afford a bass amp at the moment. When I was satisfied with my bass tracks, I brought everything upstairs again, plugged the laptop into the mixer, and listened to the recording on the big speakers. The drum and bass tracks seemed pretty crisp, because the drums were generated by Magix, and the bass was plugged right into the mixer. But the guitar, again, had that same old "I'm listening to you from the bushes outside your house" feel. I also started to notice flaws in my playing. Certain things seemed very sloppy all of the sudden --like the solo. Maybe that's from the frustration of recording; maybe that's just an excuse. Also I noticed that it doesn't always loop properly. Sometimes it does, but other times it seems to lag at the point where it goes from the end back to the beginning. I'm not sure if that's because of something I did, or if it's because of the computer...

So because time was running out, I submitted the thing, hoping that I might get a chance to rerecord it if the Castle Crashers team liked it. Normally I don't like plugging my guitars directly into the mixer, because I don't like them without distortion, and I don't have a distortion pedal. Normally I just turn the gain up on my amp, and it sounds pretty good. But when recording, that's just not adequate. Maybe that's because I don't have a good mic. Maybe it's because I'm not in a sound-proof room. I realized that Magix has an amp simulator, and I'm thinking that, for future recordings, I'll try using that while plugging the guitar into the mixer, but I was having trouble finding a distortion option that I liked... Not really sure what to do.

Anyway, here's the recording:

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen /91395