SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: “Small Island, Big Experiment,” FiveThirtyEight Science, Oct 2016, as used in the post “Florida Keys voting on genetically-modified mosquito plan” (and the followup).
ABSTRACT: This is the first time in however many years (nine?) that I’ve been a whole month late with a song and penitential cover. But here’s a song in time for November. It’s about mosquitoes. As an adoptive parent, I don’t actually literally believe the chorus here, but since I’m singing from the viewpoint of a desperate arthropod looking for blood and hoping to pass on genes (that have, alas, been rewritten), I figure it’s OK.
I was halfway through mixing down vocals when I realized this is probably the melody to a Pedro the Lion song. I’m not sure which one, but one of them. I figure that’s OK too.
Recording is still a huge challenge. I have partitioned my drive so it’s Lubuntu on one side and Ubuntu Studio on the other. Unfortunately, Reaper won’t run on Ubuntu Studio (probably because it takes too much CPU and this is a very old machine)… but in Lubuntu, I can’t get the soundcard to separate the audio input from all the sound coming out of the soundcard. So I had to make all the drums and bass and MIDI stuff in Reaper, mix it down to a scratch track, then go to Ubuntu Studio, insert that audio into Ardour – which seems powerful, but is still a little bit foreign, so I can’t move very quickly in it – then take the recorded tracks, export them as stems and bring them back into Lubuntu/Reaper to do final mixing. Yet I got it done. I’m gonna have to figure things out. Have to.
Anyway, we’ve got some guitars doing a mosquito-wing drone, we’ve got a bass line, we’ve got a couple drums and we’ve got me singing and strumming. It all came together.
Now, another song and a cover. Somehow!