Posts tagged with “recording”, “portfolio”, and “music”
Signal Chains (beta)
Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:
The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?
The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.
everyday/everynight - Moon Phases
This has been finished for a while but just recently released. It’s the debut release of a band several friends are in, everyday/everynight, and it’s called Moon Phases. I recorded, mixed, mastered, and played bass on this thing. I also painted the first moon on the cover art. All tracking was done within three days at my house. Mixing and mastering was done at The Punch in Lenexa, KS.
The main challenge throughout the whole process was not an uncommon one: retaining the dynamics of the songs without isolating you to a quiet room and an awesome stereo system. It’s definitely on average “quieter” than a lot of albums, but we all agreed it was an appropriate album for that sort of thing.
Pick one of these up and support your local working band. * rimshot *
everyday/everynight tracking
I spent last weekend recording a nine song album for everyday/everynight at home. Everything went fairly well and we were able to track all instruments for every song and three vocal parts for three songs.
We scrounged together enough equipment between Jerad and me to be able to track guitars/keys and drums live. Ryan from The Punch was gracious enough to lend me an Audix drum mic pack, two AKG C451s, and three AKG C460. Two PreSonus Firepods (pre FP10) were daisy-chained together for the interface. Mics got some love from an ART MPA Digital, a couple of the older, noisier Presonus BlueTubes, and an ART Pro VLA. In most cases, this is what was used:
I’ve posted a mic list on RedMinutes for anyone who is interested. The password is mics
We used what we had and got a pretty good sounding result. I was pretty happy with Jerad’s Dragonfly. It was very smooth but still had a nice crispness. Nowhere near as (sometimes) harsh sounding as the MXL 992 on vocals. It fit Jerad’s voice nicely and made a killer guitar amp room mic.
All the tracking was done in Ableton Live 7. I’ve said it before and I’ll stand by it: I think Live is pretty darn quick and easy to track in. It’s not as powerful as a lot of other things and it’s not really tailored toward multitrack recording, but for getting stuff to tape it’s pretty handy.
I did encounter some problems a few times with buffering the samples. On a couple occasions the audio would actually drop out in the middle of tracking. I’m not 100% sure what caused this. It could have just been the speed of the hard drive.
At one point we went back to a song to record the beginning after we had recorded the end with different instrumentation. Somehow I had accidently cleared some audio regions from the session and my Undo history was toast. I had to manually locate the files and drop them back into the project. Part of that final section we had recorded, however, had a punch-in towards the end of the track and I thought I was going to have to adjust the clip length to fit it back in with the original take. That is, until I remembered that Live saves an analysis file2 with each audio file in a project, containing information about clip length, Warp, and placement. All I had to do was drop the file back into the project and bump it over to where the original take ended. The clip bounds were exactly how they were after I edited the two takes together.
File management is also pretty slick with Live, as long as you can get used to the concept of Projects. Basically, the Project contains all the audio and analysis files that the “sets”3 within it access. This makes session-wide file cleanup possible in a few clicks. Finding unused audio files does so across all sets.
Live 8 will apparently include some things that will make it a little friendlier to multi-track recording. We’ll see.
1 Nice balanced sound. Might be a new favorite.
2 They have a .asd extension and are in the Samples folder of your project.
3 .als files
Brent, Dustin, and I managed to get a lot done in the five short days he was here. Along with remixing some songs that he had tracked elsewhere, we recorded five new tunes.
Here’s a semi-final version of Growin’ Old by The Awful Truth.
Players
- Brent Colbert: Acoustic Guitar and Vocals (it’s his song, he wrote it.)
- Ross Brown: Drums, Bass, Electric Piano
- Brent Colbert, Dustin Gamble, Alexandria Fortenbery, Ross Brown: Background vocals
Mics
- Acoustic Guitar: Mid-side stereo with AKG C414 — Side (thanks to Ryan and The Punch at Premier Studios) and MXL 991 — Mid.
- Vocals: MXL 992 through Pro VLA
- Bass: DI through Pro VLA
Drums
- Snare: SM57
- Kick: EV RE20
- Overheads: AKG C 460B (with the CK-1 capsule), or maybe they are the 452 EB, I’ll have to check.
- Low Tom: Sennheiser 421 — this track wasn’t even used. I never played it.
- High Tom: Some Nady mic that comes with their cheapest drum mic kit.
Misc
The Pro VLA was used mainly for tonal purposes. Yes, the MXLs are cheap mics, but they have a certain sound that was good for these recordings. I was very pleased with the 992 on Brent’s voice — very concentrated. We tried the C414 but is was too dark, or, if you’d rather, “neutral” for Brent.
The song was tracked in Ableton Live and mixed in Logic Pro. It was all overdubs with pretty much one take on everything.
I’ll probably post more songs from this session. It turned out sounding pretty darn good, I think. I’ll be working a bit more on editing before the whole thing is finished.
No For an Answer (take two)
Alright, so I rushed it last time. I had burned a compressed signal of the kick drum and forgot to mute the original, so there were two kick tracks in that last mix. Bad bad bad. I tweaked some other things and redid the vocal tracks. Overall I think it sounds much better than the original.
Let me know what you think.