STILL GOING

Yesterday we continued with the track. We dropped the vocals onto protools and placed mine and Nic's under each other to play simultaneously. Our plan for today was to change the levels so we don't have any loud or quiet parts that will stand out, bring in some more sounds to fill the gaps, create a proper ending, thicken up the drum sounds and add the japanese midi instrument...the shamisen.
We focused on the vocals to start off. Nicola's tended to be louder than mine on most of the takes (i think she stood closer to the mic) so Nic lowered the gain by a few db's on her voice. It would be great if we could select both of our vox and have the db set to the same level, that would have saved a bit of time. The vox were also slightly out of time from when we put them onto the track yesterday, this was more noticeable when just listening to them with the drums. We chopped bits out and faded the ends, taking notes out of just one to make sure they both matched well. A couple of keyboard notes were detected too from playing the notes whilst singing so they had to go. There were a few low frequency sounds on a couple of the takes but we can't really do anything about them now at this point in time without re-doing the vox and there is no way we have the time to be perfecting them. Hopefully, once surrounded by all of the other noise and effects it won't be noticeable.
Nic's housemate had written some chords down that fitted our notes so Nic played them from the keyboard onto the track. They keyboard wasn't working at first and the chords were placed on by hand which was taking forever!! Luckily it went well after that. What we want to do is have the shamisen, which is a midi instument in Logic, to play where the chords are to give a nice oriental sound. As we have been working in protools though, this isn't as easy as we would like. Protools doesn't have the shamisen so what Matt suggested to us was to create the midi track first, using Kontakt, and then put the whole track back into Logic to change the midi track to the shamisen. So that's our plan for tomorrow and i hope it works.
The video was briefly discussed, i really want to get the track done so we can start filming. We don't know the location yet so i feel like we have to start ASAP and give ourselves enough time to complete it. I think we came to an agreement that we would put the shamisen in, tidy up the track a bit and then move on. If we didn't have a time restriction, we could perfect the track with no worries but as we only have a few weeks until we break for xmas i will feel a lot better knowing we have the video done, ready for editing so that can be done over the holidays. We can then do the perfecting when we get back as we'll have 2 weeks to polish up the project.