I'm home alone for most of today. I had to feed the animals since no one else was here to do it. We have a cat, a couple rabbits, and a bunch of ducks. We used to have geese, but they wandered off. When I was bringing the duck food to the duck food dishes, ducks were flying at my face. I was ducking to dodge ducks.
Most of this autumn has been really wet. It's been raining a lot. Days when it doesn't rain, it's still wet from the day or two before that it did rain. I love rain, but for several months now I had been planning activities I need to do this autumn for my album. One of them includes picking up red leaves for the album art, and I've been doing that. It's not a problem picking up wet leaves, but it would be much more pleasant collecting leaves if everything wasn't so wet. The other main activity I wanted to do was recording sounds for the album. Probably the most important one I planned to record was the sound of me walking on dead leaves to the beat of the outro of the song "We're All Lost In Autumn". For this I need dry leaves. Crispy, crunchy leaves. Not soggy leaves. The last time we had a day where everything was really dry was the day my aunts and uncle came to visit a few weeks ago, and I was thinking about recording it then, but I had to do a lot of cleaning because of my relatives' arrival, so I didn't record then. I've spent the past several soggy days wishing I had recorded that last dry day.
Finally today I decided it was dry enough to do some recording. I prepared. I had the guide track put on CD and in my CD player in my pocket, with my headphones on. I was all bundled up because it's rather chilly outside. I had my camera batteries charged. I went outside and started on the deck. The plan was to press play on the CD player to start the guide track, which I had a four-beat intro on to get the beat in my head before I started walking on the leaves, and after I press play, I'd press record on the camera, and start walking on the leaves while holding the camera. On the 17th beat of leaf walking, I would stop in my tracks, for that is to be the end of the song.
On about the third beat, the ducks started making a whole lot of duck noises. I maybe wouldn't have minded so much but not only didn't I want duck sounds in the song, but they were being so loud I think it was probably drowning out the sound of the leaves under my feet. I walked to the front of the house (the ducks were behind the house), and started recording in the driveway. I feel like they knew exactly when I was pressing play, because each time I'd try recording they'd start making a lot more noise. I got frustrated and decided to walk away from my house. I kept walking down the dirt road until I couldn't hear ducks anymore. The leaves on the dirt road weren't good enough because they were so packed down from cars driving over them.
I walked into the woods. I realize this might not have been such a good idea since I wasn't wearing bright colors and I have no idea whether or not it is hunting season. I really don't pay attention to which times of year it is legal to kill relatively defenseless animals. There were logging trails I haven't walked down before, and I walked very far down them, recording the part several times. Picking up nice red leaves whenever I saw them. When recording the sounds of nature, you really start noticing all the unnatural sounds buried beneath the natural sounds. The subtle hum of the motors in my CD player that makes the CD spin and the laser change position, the vague sound of cars a half a mile away on the main road... At one point I even heard an airplane going by. When you're waiting for an airplane to go by so you can't hear it anymore, it really takes a long time. It's like watching a pot of water on the stove waiting for it to boil.
It was kind of difficult to record what I was recording. I had to make sure I was stepping right on the beat so it will sound right in the song, and I had to be counting the 17 beats so I don't make one step too many. That's more difficult than it sounds. I also have a cold, so I had to make sure I wasn't making any sniffling sounds or coughing. I ruined a couple of takes by coughing. There were also several takes where one step out of the 17, the leaves just didn't sound right. It wasn't enough of a crunch under my feet or something, so I'd scrap those takes. I got 6 takes I think are possibly usable though, and later I'll put them on my computer and see if there's anything I can use.
When I walked back to my house, I noticed the ducks were silent again, still behind the house, so I decided to try recording again there, because the leaves just sounded so nice beneath my feet. I pressed play on my CD player and record on my camera, and by about the third beat, the ducks started making a lot of noise. I know it's just my imagination, but their duck sounds really sounded like an evil cackle, a lot like Skeletor from the 80's Masters Of The Universe cartoon. It sounded like they were laughing at me.
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