The bulk of today was spent helping Kiri and Mary move into their new house. I drove a ten foot truck out to Target, Home Despot, Bed, Bath and Beyond to get new house supplies, and I helped them move the stuff they didn't want the movers to handle when they have the professionals roll in for the next round. It was fun, and the house is beautiful, and the few neighbors who came over to introduce themselves at the sight of the moving truck all seemed really nice.

Before I left in the morning to get breakfast and pick up the truck for the day, I was up most of the night working on "All I Want for Christmas Is a Telecaster."

I finally found a church bell sample that I really like, and it was right under my nose as a preset in the EDIROL Virtual Sound Canvas plug-in synth all along. I don't even know much about the plug-in except that it came with Sonar 4 when I bought it. I'm sure I must have played around with it before, but I know I've never used it on anything I've recorded. Anyway, the church bells preset isn't a stellar sample, but it's the right timbre and the same sort of cliché Christmas joy-sounding bell I'd been looking for. I knew I was gonna slather it in reverb and/or delay to get it to sound distant anyway, so I was happy.

Another unlikely plug-in finally came in handy when I went to process the bells too. I'm a sucker for free plug-ins from companies who make [non-free] plug-ins I like, and I usually download and install them when I find them even if I don't know what use I'll have for them. I bought PSP Audioware's Vintage Warmer ages ago and have been using it all over the place ever since, but their little free PianoVerb plug-in was one that never found any kind of utilitarian place in my recording, and I figured it was doomed to be a novelty effect. Somewhere along the way I started using it on sampled pianos to make them sound more realistic, and that does work pretty well once you learn how to tweak PianoVerb a bit. (It's not a terribly amazing realization given that PianoVerb models the reverberation of the strings inside of a piano.) Anyway, to make a long story short, early this morning in a combination of creative problem solving and, well, luck, I discovered PianoVerb works well as a "realism adder" for just about any sampled pitched percussive instrument. Bells, glockenspiels, xylophones, pianos, etc. It even sounded pretty good on some timpani samples I've got.

I have a horrific amount of stuff to get cleaned up and organized and packed before I leave Monday for the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'm not sure if I'll have much time to work more on this song before I'm away from my studio for about five days, but I don't need more than a few hours of experiments and tweaks tops before it'll be done. At the moment it runs just over three minutes, about 10% of the total amount I need to record to complete the challenge officially again this year.