Wretched

Wretched

A collection of rough recordings of song ideas that I was working on in the late 1990’s.

All of the tracks are available for listening online.

Keep in mind these are rough ideas with incomplete lyrics and arrangements, or experimental recording techniques.

There are some audio clicks caused by the age and wearing of the media it was recorded on and subsequently was ripped from.

These are all digital recordings, and were created on a Power Macintosh clone with multiple pieces of software to tame the levels coming from a low-quality analog mixer.
Also of note, this is my first attempt at recording in a home studio and I still had much to learn.

This represents some early attempts at exploring the world of multiple tracks in a digital format. I had previously played around with four-track tape recorders and these recordings were created using a Realistic brand four channel mixer interface which functioned primarily as a method of achieving close to line-level input to the computer and as such no more than two inputs were possible at a time using the stereo channels. There are no mic’d amplifiers to be found here, all guitar sounds are direct to the mix board.

The first version of “Serenity in Sorrow” features one of the first guitar solos I ever attempted to write and pioneered a trick I’ve used a couple of times since where I stitched together a few different takes to make a single cohesive passage. Inspired by Marilyn Manson, I tried to do some creepy vocal overdubbing.

The alternative recording of “Serenity in Sorrow” features multiple vocal takes, distorted bass guitar (the bass was run through my beloved Boss Metal Zone pedal, R.I.P.) with some clean bass overdubs and a drum track which was created using the General MIDI capabilities of QuickTime as it existed in the late ’90s. I had done some stupid trick where I audio recorded the output of the computer playing back the MIDI file and then overdubbed the rest of the takes. The rough aggressive vocals were achieved by screaming into the mic facing a wall with the backing track playing loudly in my ears. Fun times.

Twitch features one of my first attempts at adding a bass line to a song I had written.

Mellow is a single-take ad-libbed recording of an instrumental idea I had been working on where I was peddling on the rhythm whilst simultaneously playing a lead line. I thought it was a cool concept at the time.

“G” was an overdub ad-lib where I told someone to pick a chord (they chose G) and I ad-libbed variations of the chord into an instrumental track in front of their eyes as a demo. Basically I was trying to show off.