My shoulder hurts.

Day two was great.

I added another 10 minutes of guitar tracks, bringing me up to 22 minutes. I guess I'm going with the 12-10-8 split. A lot of the music is so slow I don't have much excuse to hit 30 minutes. I'm also keeping track of how long I actually spend on this thing (like many people I have a full-time job, so I've only got about 3 hours after work each day).

I ended up writing a pretty upbeat, happy section, which was a little distressing (not that I'm not happy myself, it's just not what I wanted for this album). So I decided, as I always do, to ruin it and abruptly switch to something incredibly depressing, because screw everyone.

My roommate Andrew gave me a great idea that I tried out last night, which was to mic my electronic drums -- that is, just use the sound of hitting the pads. And it sounds awesome. The snare actually sounds a little like a snare, which was surprising. I also discovered that the game Bananagrams makes an excellent percussion instrument.

I'm pretty confident I'll be able to go 95% acoustic for this album. I'm starting to like the sound of miking everything pretty far away. I recorded the guitar pretty close to the computer, so you can hear the fan throughout. So I think giving the whole album a really raw, live sound will cover that up. There'll be hiss ALL over the place and the haters will do what they do best.

I've also been using some pretty insane tunings, mostly due to laziness. The songs are totally unperformable, as each song has several tuning changes from one riff to the next. And I've been spending huge amounts of time trying to keep my parlor guitar in tune -- I've been using an online tuner but I haven't checked it against any other instruments, so I sincerely hope my tuner is in tune, otherwise I'm absolutely screwed.

I'm also toying with the idea of pitch shifting some of my acoustic instruments an octave down just to increase the weirdness factor and get some more variety. This album will be very glockenspiel-heavy, so I'm wondering what a pitch-shifted glock sounds like -- same for melodica, oh yeah.

Anyway, just gotta write 8 more minutes tonight, and then the fun begins tomorrow.