I've been working on and off on a guitar version of Norman Blake's Bright Days for more than ten years now.

You know the deal: get most of it under your fingers, and put off polishing it up to a performance-ready level for ages. Well, I figured trying to record it would be a good excuse to finally get on that.

I should definitely work on a mandolin version now that I've picked one up, but I decicded to stick to my guns and keep the melody on the guitar on this one, just to change things up a bit. I did play a simple chop to back things up, figuring it'd make for a nice mirror from Norman and Tony's version.¹

I've got a lot to yap about on this one, but I figure most of you won't care so I'll start with the actual tune and start the rambling below in case anyone's interested.

Still took me longer than I'd like, but not as long as the previous tune I did. I got started at the end of july and got a few temporary tracks done, and then put off doing the real takes for weeks as the heat sucked the will to do just about anything out of me.

On the technical / production side, It's all still pretty shaky, but I fixed a latency² issue I had³, and boy, does this make a difference. Last time I had to mute the tracks I was recording and put the headphones on one ear to hear myself. Turns out that proper monitoring does make a hell of a differnce.

This also allowed me to actually experiment with mic placement, and the raw tracks all sound much better as a result. Sadly I still suck in the DAW. The overall mix is not so bad, but I must have messed something up as I can't get any more volume without clipping...⁴ I had to compress things more than I'd like to get to this point, but oh well.

Bass and mandolin are both pretty simple parts and got done pretty quickly. And then I spent a whole week on the guitar part alone. Sigh.

As I said, I've been playing this tune for a while already, and I'm pretty sure I could give you a decent rendition in person. But under the microscope of the microphone, all the flaws become painfully obvious, and boy, there was a lot of them.

This is why recording yourself is such an important part of learning. This is also why it can get so frustrating.

Luckily, I was able to take it as an opportunity to focus on fixing the flubs and refine my technique. Recording take after take was as infuriating as usual, but I could hear the tone and overall flow getting better and better, and noticing those improvements helped me take it in stride and enjoy the ride.⁵

I had to pay attention to my left hand as it tended to mute certain notes that should be ringing, but mostly I focused on reducing tension, which still gets way too high whenever I hit "record". I also worked on posture and tried to force myself to keep my back straight (I have a tendency to hunch over the guitar when sitting down), and I was surprised at how much of a difference that made, even tonally. Hopefully I'll keep paying attention to this in the future.

Also, I broke one of the the mandolin's E strings⁶ almost as soon as I got started. Since it only plays quiet chords, I figured no one would notice.

I'm not thrilled by the result, but I'm at the point that I'm so sick of the damn thing that I should just get it over with if I don't want to just give up on it. Treat it as a step on a learning journey or whatever.

I should definitely keep recording things. Hopefully I'll figure out what's wrong with my levels and manage to improve the sound as I keep tinkering. It's an interesting way to work anyway, and getting to the point where I can just relax and play can't hurt in the long run.

I've got a few ideas for the next tunes, and I should be free enough to get started on the next one pretty soon. I plan to keep things pretty simple on that one, so with any luck it'll be done in less than a month.⁷

See ya internets. Hope you liked what you heard.