FAFO – Ray Toler

Well. That escalated quickly. So much for simplification.

As I’ve mentioned before, over the last 4-5 years, I’ve felt a lot of unnecessary pressure to come out swinging on the first day. A lot of Day 1 songs have been strong, but whether that’s because I have some creative reserve or just “let’s get started” energy or even just a happy stroke of luck… well, your guess is as good as mine.

FAFO Ray Toler 4:09

As I have for the past few years, I started writing the night before, but I’d been dragging my feet a bit. I should have cleaned up the studio, should have verified everything was working and all the software updated and installed all the Black Friday hoo-ha, but I played Factorio¹instead. Factorio is a great environment for me to scratch that “figure things out” itch and I love figuring out why things aren’t working or how I could make them better. That will become ironic in just a bit.

Whenever I’m procrastinating – and as an aside, that’s a loaded term because I’ve learned that it’s not always a bad thing – there’s this hidden internal timer in my brain that goes off when I really need to get started. It’ll also go off when I realize that I’m looking for excuses to do something else. The timer went off about 30 minutes before dinner, so I decided that I’d get started after eating.

The Fuse is Lit

I went into the studio in the early evening, fired up Scrivener, and sat for a minute or two trying to think of an opening line. And an opening line showed up. And I wrote the lyrics in about 30-40 minutes without any heartburn or angst. The majority of the time was working out non-stupid rhymes or changing the structure around a bit while dabbling with some melodic ideas in my head for how I’d sing them. I made some changes, I moved some things around, but the short of it is that it was pretty easy as far as writing lyrics goes.

Well. This is going to be a cake walk. Time for a break I guess!

After a short break, I went back into the studio. And I have no idea what I did for the next several hours. I made the arrogant mistake of thinking that since I had the lyrics and knew the style I’d be doing, that the majority of the work could be done in the morning. Without really done any actual productive work other than the lyrics, I headed to bed around midnight.

And Boom Goes the Dynamite

Ah, morning. Coffee. Contemplation. Thinking about playing a little Factorio, but no! I need to get working. Actually, scratch that. I want to get working. That’s a great feeling!

My DAW (Digital Performer) got a bug fix update a week or two ago, and everyone had been saying it was rock solid and fixed some hiccups with the version I’ve been using, so I decided to ignore the old “never update your software when you’ve got things to do” rule. And that’s when the trouble started.

I know this is a guitar track, so I hook up one of my favorite pieces of gear that I acquired last year: a Kemper Profiler.² This is one of those “buy once cry once” things that I should have gone for years ago. The first time I plugged in, I had one of those magical moments where I learned that sometimes it actually is the gear and not the musician. To a point, anyway. I’m not a (good) guitarist, and I’ve never known how to set up a rig to get a sound. The Kemper actually made me sound good.

Good. Fine. Guitar is hooked up. Why is there no sound coming out of the speakers? Is it that stupid software update? Are the audio interfaces decoupled? An hour or two goes by.³ I finally figure out the deeply-hidden technical problem.

I had the volume turned down.

This is an architectural change I made last year. In the past, I’ve used the physical volume knob on my monitor-selection interface to change the volume, but I had calibrated the studio to a specific decibel level and had switched to using the Macintosh’s volume control. I have to switch back and forth between two volume levels depending on whether or not I’m using the VSX headphone system or not.

There were a few more stupid “I have no memory of this place” or learning my gear moments. Which brings me to the first lesson-learned of this round of Song-A-Day: be sure everything’s updated, learned, and working well at least two weeks before February.⁴

Wasn’t There a Song to Record?

After a couple of hours of problem-solving frustration⁵ I actually hit record. I put up a scratch beat and recorded the bass part. Then I started on the guitars. I hope I get better over the month because I only needed three guitar tracks, but it took me half the day to get them recorded. Some of that was perfectionism, some of it bumping into technical problems to try and achieve the perfectionism.

Not a big deal. I’ll get better at playing and better and not being so demanding. After a few attempts, I realized that part of my problem was trying to read the lyrics to know where I was in the song and screwing up the playing as a result, so I recorded a scratch vocal.

You guessed it. More technical issues.This time it was an incorrect setting on the microphone routing. I thought I had this all dialed in! No matter. It’s figured out. On we go! Wait… the comp tool keeps forgetting what I’ve chosen and going back to something else. And the normally flawless crossfading keeps glitching. Maybe if I bounce it? Yeah, that kind of worked.

Until DP started crashing on me, most often while using the comp tool. I’m not quite ready to say this version is a buggy piece of crap, because I suspect one of the plugins I was using might have been the cause, but we’ll see tomorrow. I did get back into the habit of manually saving almost constantly.

The rest of the day proceeded in a similar way. The combination of my rusty memory and technical problems meant that this song didn’t get posted until after 11:00 PM – no time to start on tomorrow’s track, so I’m already behind schedule. But the song doesn’t suck, day one is complete, and I’m off on another journey.⁶

Lyrics

I’ve been sitting here all night
While you’ve got something to sell
You think you’re in the right
Oh yeah, you think it’s going well

You talk a big game
And you name all the names
Think you’ve won all the points
And you’ve placed all the blame 

And I’ve been sitting here all night
While you parrot all the lines
You say you’re gonna fight
Gonna slaughter all the swine

You get your big stick
And you pick up your brick
But it’s hard to throw down
While you’re swingin’ your dick

‘Cause You ain’t got the juice
You ain’t got the stones
You can’t tie the noose
Tight enough to snap these bones

You ain’t got the action
You ain’t got the nerve
So before you need extraction
Walk away
This ain’t your day

FAFO

I’ve been sitting here all night
Watching you working all the girls
You’re trying to incite
While you’re clutching at your pearls

You say you’re elite
That you’re gonna defeat and
Burn it all to the ground
Well let’s redeem that receipt

‘Cause I’ve been sitting here all night
While you keep digging your hole
You never had the sight
To know you’re under control

You’re talking your smack
And you think it’s a craic
But it won’t feel the same
When you’re flat on your back

CHORUS

FAFO

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Trilian, XO, Superior Drummer, Aparillo, Squire Fat Strat

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter Pro-C 2, Pro-L 2, Gullfoss, Valhalla Delay, Butch Vig Vocals,⁷ MOTU Dynamics and Diamond Drive, Cinematic Rooms, Kemper Profiler

Notes

1
One of the best games to come out in the last decade. If you have any type of desire for order, problem solving, optimization, making things better, or playing with trains, do not buy Factorio or you will lose literally months of your life to it. I am not exaggerating. Don’t do it. It’s called Cracktorio for a reason.
2
I discovered it a few years back while gear spotting the Babymetal backing band.
3
I’ll save you from the tedious story involving crawling under desks and replugging damn near every cable, cursing various vendors, cursing myself, rebooting, rebooting again…
4
There were a lot of similar comments on the Song-A-Day site from participants who were trying to remember how to get everything running. At least I didn’t suffer alone.
5
See? I told you the Factorio thing would become ironic. I did not enjoy these problems at all.
6
I’m very unhappy with the mix, the vocals need work. No time now, but I’ll definitely be fixing some things and re-uploading at some point in the future.
7
I’m thinking this may have been the crash culprit