Just What I Needed

Just What I Needed (28)

READ THIS! I'm writing this here for those of you who don't read my rants at the end.

There is a reference to characters from jules130's story Rock Prodigy because we're planning to do a crossover between the two stories in later chapters and that's why I dedicated it to her...

"This is crap."

"Huh?" Keely said blankly, blinking as she raised her head. She'd been lounging relaxed in one of the chairs in the control room, her feet propped on the edge of the table with her head leaning on the back of the chair and her arms crossed loosely over her stomach.

Seth spared a moment to send her a scowl, before turning back to the laptop, his scowl deepening. "This track, it's crap. What were you and Marco thinking when you recorded it?"

Yes, ripping off his head was becoming a more and more pleasant prospect for Keely with every word he spoke. He apparently had no censor when it came to her music. "It's not crap! This is a good song, what's really wrong with it?"

"Yeah, it's good, Staub. Which makes it shit compared to what we've been recording."

That she could agree with, but not out loud! Something about Seth put her back up, that had become more than obvious, but she was being extra ornery with him on that day because there had been a definite lack of sleep the night. It had all been because a song in her head, which she'd been afraid would flee had she not worked on it straight away.

So instead of saying she agreed, Keely glared at him fiercely before letting her head fall on the chair's back again. "You're the producer, go fix it, pop star."

"I don't want to fix it like that!" he exclaimed. "Haven't you understood anything about how we've been recording so far? If it was anyone else's album, I'd be using pro tools a whole lot more, but I don't want to do that to your music, it doesn't need it in the same way! It's raw, it's real and I need the album to reflect that!"

Surprised, Keely raised her head again, allowing their gazes to connect closely over the space between them.

But Seth looked away first, turning to frown at the computer screen again. "What kind of mic did you use for the vocals?"

"An eighty-five," she replied promptly.

He groaned loudly, rubbing a hand over his shadowed eyes and pushing it through his hair, causing the front to stand up again. "Seriously? It should've been a condenser mic for this song, an eighty-five worked with Denial, but Marco was just being an idiot with this one. It's like he was trying to make it sound packaged and fake. It just doesn't work for this song."

For a moment, Keely simply considered him, it was hard to be annoyed with him more than usual when he'd had a little rant about her music being real. "So do you want me to go back into the booth so we can re-do the vocals?" she asked quietly, not even a hint of mutiny in her voice.

"Not when he has a secondary guitar track, I mean, what's the point of that? It's just over-producing that way."

Sighing she rubbed her temples, "Then delete the track and then I'll do the vocals with a condenser."

"No," he answered simply.

"Then what do you want me to do?!"

"We're going to have to re-write the song," he said finally, looking back to her. His scowl was gone, replaced with a thoughtful expression. "I mean, we can't have this song on the album, the lyrics are weak."

Yeah, she'd been wrong, Keely decided. It was incredibly easy to get annoyed with him after his little rant. "Weak?! They're not weak!"

In reality, she knew that the lyrics weren't some of her strongest, but she just couldn't admit it to him. Not when he'd just insulted her while she was running precariously low on sleep as of late.