Your Home Studio

I am so full of it

2007-05-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

Well,
It looks like I'm a big fat liar. Not only did I not post every week like I said I would in the last post, I haven't posted here since December 9th, 2006. I have, however, posted on another blog blogat.yourhomestudio.com. I intend to continue to post there so if you're subscribed to this one, hop on over to the other one.

"Thanks for the memories"

Thomas

Holiday Shopping Guide

2006-12-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

I just posted the Holiday Shopping Guide to the website. It took me quite some time to put it together and I think I will start doing in earlier in November next year so I'm not quite so rushed. I haven't done much in the studio over the last month and a half because of work and not actually being here but this weekend I plan to get in there and get things re-organized so I can get some things done. Plus Joel's going to be back in town for a couple of weeks and I'm sure he's going to work on some things. I promise I will try to post at least every week from now on so check back.

Joel's Mad at Me, I think

2006-09-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

Joel left on the 25th of August to pursue his dream of being a doctor and by all accounts, he seems to be having a great time. I decided that I would take the 12 or so songs that we had recorded and produce them myself. The idea is that I would have a CD finished by the time he came back in December for the Holidays. I choose "Anna" as the first song and I intend to go alphabetically through the list. Some of the songs like "Smells Like" and "Caroline" are done and I won't have to mess with them.
Anyway, I recorded a guitar part that I liked pretty well and my first ever keyboard part (a B-3 organ played through an overdriven Marshall). You can check them out here. The organ probably won't come in until the first chorus and I think the guitar part is ok where it is. I also intend to add some sort of percussion (either shaker or cabasa) to the choruses and outro. Whether or not to do anything vocally is questionable.
Here's why I think Joel's mad at me. He tryed to call us using Skype last week and we were gone to dinner so we missed his call. I called him back at his hotel room in St. Martin. I told him what I had done and that I would send him the file. I've been very busy at work and he sent me an email a couple of days ago wanting to know why I hadn't sent the file. Well, for some reason, I woke up at 1:30 or so Wednesday morning and I mixed down the file and put it on the website and sent him an email with the link. I haven't heard from him since. It may just be that he's been busy too and hasn't had time to check it out. We'll see. Let me know what you think of it.

Joel's Leaving

2006-07-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

I've been terrible about keeping up with the blog but I had a sales person quit around the 1rst of May and I've been focusing on work for the last couple of months. Now I've got something else to worry about. Joel has been on vacation since the beginning of the month and before he left, he dropped a bit a bomb on me. He's been applying to medical schools and though his first choice was to attend LSU Medical School here in Shreveport, he got accepted to a medical school in the Caribbean on the island of St. Martin (tough gig - HA). He leaves on August 28th for 2 years but he'll be back for the holidays. Brandon and I are working on our parts although last night, Brandon told me he got invited to go with a friend of his to Hilton Head for a week and that he can't really do anything until after he gets back so I've got my work cut out for me. Last night, Brandon finished re-recording the drums to "Anna". He thought his original track was a bit tame and I have to agree with him. We recorded that song almost immediately after Joel wrote it and the drums were a bit too straight forward. So for the next week and half, I've got to go it alone. Lorraine(my wife) recorded some background vocals for a song called "Saved" that I'm sure is going to polarize people. It's about how some people let religion get in the way of spirituality. It's funny and poignant at the same time and I just love it. I'm absolutely committed to finishing the CD because we've been working so long on it that I can't just walk away from it. Besides, there's some really good material here and it needs to get out there. I intend to take a different tack as far as promoting this record especially seeing that we won't be able to perform. Playing gigs around here isn't going to really help us anyway. I'll start posting the progress on the production at least once a week so check back.

Ben Rocks (Come On, Come On)

2006-04-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

We(Me, my wife, my daugher, her friend Alex, Joel and Brandon) went to the Ben Folds show in Ruston, LA last night. Chris Mills opened for Ben and he was ok. It was just him on guitar and a drummer. Suprisingly enough, his material was almost enough to hold the crowd's attention. The drummer was more than proficient to say the least. Before Ben came on, he had this song about how you should walk the straight and narrow or else God would f..k you up. It was hilarious. I've always been a fan of his since I bought "Forever and Ever, Amen" for my daughter when she was in junior high but I hadn't really heard a lot of his new stuff. All I can say is that he is the most entertainment I've had for $20 in forever. At one point in the show, he started talking about all ringtones he had bought for his phone that day. Then he asked a stagehand to get his phone so he could play them for us. It was like being at a party where a guy is playing piano and telling jokes. After he played a few ringtones, he said we should wish William Shatner Happy Birthday because it was a few days ago. He dialed the number and the voicemail came on an said "You've reached the Sprint voicemail of ....." and we're all waiting for it to say "William Shatner" but instead it says "85..." and then Ben pulled the phone away from the mike until the number was finished and then we all sang "Happy Birthday to Bill". It seemed like there wasn't anyone he didn't want to piss off. He played a rap song by Dr. Dre that was all about ho's and biatches, etc, etc, etc and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. Then, of course, he played "Rockin' the Suburbs" and went into this kind of bash against the current state of rock(?) music. The set was awesome but he hadn't played "200 Solemn Faces" before the encore so I was a little concerned that he wasn't going to play it. Then for the last song, he started it off and I jumped around like a little kid who was told he was about to get a piece of candy. The Radiohead show in New Orleans about 2 years ago was the best show musically I'd ever been to but this was definately the most intimate and fun.
We got in about 1:00AM and I woke up about 8:00 and made coffee. The house was quiet so I went into the studio to work on something I am pretty excited about. I lurk a bit in few recording and guitar user groups on Yahoo and Google and about a month and half ago, someone posted something relating to whether they should take their songs to a pro studio to mix. My response was that for the amount of money a pro studio would charge to mix a CD's worth of material, you could buy a ton of plugin's and gear and just do it yourself. Then someone else suggested that one of the group members might be interested in mixing. I offered and FC got the tracks together for me to mix. It's a cover of The Beatles "Me and My Monkey" from the White Album which I think is really their most artist endeavor (Click Here for the unmixed version). The are a total of 17 tracks but you have 2 tracks for each guitar, a direct track and a amped track for the bass, two tracks for the snare and the lead vocal, a stereo track for a crash cymbal, two tracks for the toms, cymbals and other percussion and single tracks for the kick drum and background vocals. A Yamaba AW16G was used to record the guitars, bass, drum sequencer and background vocals. Guitars and basses were recorded using the Line 6 Pod and the drums are from a Boss Dr-770. The vocals were recorded remotely but I don't have details on what or how they were recorded. I started off by mixing down the lead vocal and snare to mono tracks. Then I went through each of the tracks and eq'ed them. There was really no need to compress them since FC had already done that. Note: It's cool to edit tracks to get rid of extraneous noise, etc. but try not to do to much in the way of effects that can't be reversed unless they are absolutely crucial to the feel of the song. In this case, it worked out well because there wasn't any reverb on anything but the guitars and the compression was done well. I added a delay to the vocal in order to double it (A Lennon fave) and then soloed it against the kick and bass. I brought the kick and bass up to about - 3db and then brought the vocal up to point where I could hear it clearly but it didn't overpower the other two. Click here for a sample. I put a little delay on the snare to give it some space and brought it in. Click here for the snare sample and then here to listen to it in the mix.
After I was satisfied with that I brought the rest of the kit in. I treated the cymbal and tom tracks as though they were right and left channels of a stereo mix. They were very hot so I had to pull them back quite a bit. Here they are with the rest of the mix. I fed them to an aux send with the Lexicon Pantheon reverb. The guitars were next and even though they were recorded with reverb I sent them to a another aux send with a different reverb. (click here). FC did a good job of recording them so I didn't have to do much other than pan them a bit to seperate them and then set the volumes so that they didn't get in the way of anything. There was one section that required me to step up the volume on one of the guitars so that a particular fill would cut through. Then I put a rhythmic delay on the background vocals to give them some space. I listened to a few times, made a few adjustments to the eq on the snare and the kick and exported a tk to burn to a CD to listen to in my car which is dead on. The kick was a bit hot(just a teeny bit) and the bass lacked some definition so I plan on playing around with that tonight and I think I'll be able to put that to bed.
I finally got Anna really close and I also need to put the finishing touches on that tonight. We talked Thursday about having a demo with Caroline, Anna, Back to You, and Where Ya Goin' on it along with a couple of snippets from the "No Cover" radio show we did a while back. Thinking back, that was a pretty stressful gig. I assumed that a radio station would have a room where we would be mic'd up and mixed by an engineer. It was a good thing I decided to get there early. We had to provide our own mix and feed it to the engineer. I called my wife and had her bring my Mackie 1604 VLZ along with some extra headphones so we could hear each other. On top of that, my daughter forgot to bring her keyboard so we had to rent one for $100. It was a Korg Triton so it sounded awesome and it was well worth it. The show went really well. It's one of the shows they replay every year on their "Best Of" shows. Now they do a taped show so I don't know if it would be as spontaneous as our show was.

So Sorry

2006-04-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

Hey, I know it's been a while but we've mostly been rehearsing and not doing a lot of recording. We're trying to put together a demo that will consist of 4 songs - the 3 new ones that are on the old CATCH website and "Anna". I've been working on mixing the basic tracks for "Anna". The kick drum gave me fits and once I got that fixed, the bass is just too hot. I do think that I need to bring the kick back up a bit and the snare as well and back off the bass a bit. We also recorded a new song - "Saved" - that is a bit irreverent and pretty sarcastic. It's got a kind of country feel - surprise, surprise - but Brandon's drums take it into another place altogether. I hope to have "Anna" mixed by Thursday so we can put that to bed and start playing some gigs.

Too Late 2

2006-02-22T09:23:00.000-08:00

I've been sick for the past couple of weeks but that's no excuse. We've been recording some vocal parts for a couple of songs and it's taking more work than I thought. I tried recording mine while sitting at the computer but the noise level is unbearable. I'm going to have to set the track to loop and then go into the vocal booth to do mine. We rerecorded "Too Late" last night and I am a lot happier with it. The first one had some tempo changes that I wasn't too thrilled about. The tempo is much smoother and Joel moved the key up a whole step. It gives it a bit more of an edge. I'm considering having Brandon redo his drum part on "Smells Like" because the process of replacing the drum parts is tedious at best and I'm not entirely satisfied with the results. I should follow my own advice and "Do it right the first time".
On a side note, I am so pissed off about my loss in Madden 2006 last night. I had the game right in my hands and screwed it up because of poor time management. The score was tied at 17 all and I had gotten the ball down to the 2 and it was 3rd down with about 25 seconds left. I instinctively hit the time out button instead of letting some more time run off. I kicked the field goal to go ahead. By the time Joel got the ball, he had 18 seconds left. He ran 2 plays for almost no yards and had 2 seconds left. I set up in a cover 4 safe defense and he threw a Hail Mary. His reciever got behind my defenders and ran it in for a touch down with no time left on the clock.
I'll be putting together the newsletter for the website this weekend. I hate the end of the month because in my day job, I have to fill out 4 monthly bids for the local casinos and it wears me out

Anna

2006-01-21T04:46:00.000-08:00

I'm so excited about the new song, "Anna" We originally recorded it about 2 weeks ago. The feel of it is awesome and it really moves. It only took a couple of takes before we got the drum tracks and the scratch guitar down. What you hear when you click on the link above is the original drum tracks, the final lead vocal(almost - there's one part that has to be fixed) and the rhythm guitar tracks. We recorded some percussion parts with a cabasa and a vibra-slap this past Tuesday but we're going to have work on that a bit more. Brandon is becoming a pretty good drummer but he needs a bit of work on percussion. He needs to loosen up a bit and understand that the percussion parts we need for this song are more of the punctuation variety. We'll probably use a shaker on the chorus instead of the cabasa. I'm going to start trying to work on the background vocals this weekend and finish the drum parts for "Smells Like".

It's getting towards the end of the month and I've got to start working on the newsletter for February. It will include articles on delay and phase shifting, recording lead vocals, new items from the winter NAMM and for the question portion we're going to examine how digital recording actually works. You can sign up to receive the newsletter by sending an email to signmeupplease@yourhomestudio.com

Damn, where does the time go?

2006-01-14T02:41:00.000-08:00

So much for posting every week. It's been 3 weeks since I posted but one of them doesn't count because I was out of town for a week and we didn't do much the week between Christmas and New Year's. Oh by the way, Happy New Year! We've been working on the lead vocal for "Too Late". Brandon engineered the session last Tuesday and I got to play producer. I have to say that I really prefer sitting back and listening vs working the board and trying to listen. Joel pretty much got everything except the bridge on Tuesday. The only thing we got done Thursday is the vocal on the bridge because we were sitting down in the den like we always do before practice and believe or not, we got sucked into Dancing with the Stars. I said something about mentally challenged people that cracked Joel up so bad he started crying. The bad part is that I don't remember what it was but it was no worse than something Carlos Mencia (My Hero) would say.
I'm still working on the drum tracks for "Smells Like". It's about 75% finished. It's not something you can do a little of at a time. I line up the snare and kick hits and then enter the midi notes to correspond with them for a couple of measures and then go back a bit and listen to them to make sure everything is cool. Sometimes you have to nudge the midi note a little before or after what he actually played to make it sound right. So as you can imagine, it takes about an hour or so to do 20 or 30 measures and the song is like 160 measures long. I'm going to be out of town this weekend but maybe I'll get a chance to do something with it when we get back Sunday evening.
You might want to check out the website and let me know what you think. I made some changes last weekend to the color scheme and layout. The newsletters are archived on their own page now. My wife thought the color scheme was a bit dull so we changed that. I'm going to give it another week or two to see if it makes a difference and if it doesn't I'm going back to the way it was.

Merry Christmas, Hanukah, whatever

2005-12-23T04:15:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, Hanukah, whatever - We only recorded Tuesday this week as we got together last night to exchange gifts. Joel and I got Brandon an Itunes gift certificate that said "Brandon, you're the cutest drummer we've ever had". We kid him a lot. My wife and I got Joel a couple of CD's - Wilco's A.M. and "The Essential Johnny Cash". Joel got me some wireless controllers for my PS2 (all I play on that is Madden with Joel) and Brandon got Joel and I gift certificates to Hollywood Video. Joel got Lorraine a James Taylor DVD that was the same tour we saw him on a couple of years ago. Not too shabby.
Anyway, Tuesday when we recorded, we recorded the rhythm guitar part on "I'm Doin Fine".
Joel is going to work on another guitar part for it that will be something like the guitarist from CAKE would play. We also recorded the rhythm guitar part for "Too Late". We will also have to go back to rerecord some of the drum fills as Brandon got carried away on a couple. Other than that it was pretty damn good. That one was recorded strictly off the cuff with no rehearsal at all. We played through it once and then recorded it 3 times with the last one being the best. The bass part will be rerecorded because what you hear is what's coming through on Joel's vocal mic and if you listen, you'll hear me hunt for the last note.
I'm going to be working on the website newsletter over the Christmas Holiday so I can have it ready for January 1st. I still haven't had any questions for this issue so I'm probably going to answer the second part of W.Gay's question as to whether or not a mixer is necessary in this day and time. I'm still working on the drum parts on "Smells Like" and I hope to have that finished by New Years Eve. It's going so much faster since I got that new monitor.

Too Late

2005-12-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

We've recorded the drums, scratch guitar and scratch vocal on another original - "Too Late" - since my last post. It was originally intended to be much slower but I'm glad it moves a bit better. Putting out the website newsletter for December was a bear. I decided to do a Holiday Shopping Guide and I really didn't realize how much was going to be involved. It turned out well, however. You can check it out here. I'm still working on replacing the snare and kick on "Smells Like". The job got way easier since I got a 17" monitor for the studio. The old one was a 15" and I couldn't believe the difference it made. I got up early Saturday morning and worked on it for about an hour and a half. I'm almost finished with the kick and then I've got to put the snare in. Next time I'm going to put triggers on the kick and snare just in case I have to do it again. We're going to be practicing/recording tonight and Thursday this week and then not again until next Thursday. We have two guitar parts to do so I would imagine that's where we'll start.

I'm Doin' Fine

2005-12-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to post just once a week for a while with everything that's going on with the holidays. Tuesday we got together and listened to the tracks we recorded with Joel's J-150 for "Smells Like". The technique is to tune the guitar to the key of the song and then put it right in front of a speaker. Then you play the song and record what the pickup in the guitar hears. What you get is some really ambient sounds that are kind of like a keyboard pad. We had recorded 4 tracks and two of them just didn't work so here's what the other two sound like together - Click Here .They are going to move a bit more in the stereo field to add some emphasis and I'll run them through a reverb. I'm also replacing the kick and snare hits because Brandon's snare just doesn't crack like I need it to and I just not happy with the kick sound on this song. This is what is sounds like so far - Click Here
Thursday we set Brandon's kit up again and recorded an New Song - "I'm Doin' Fine". It's a bit more upbeat and you'll get to hear me on the background vocals. The drums sound a lot better on this one. I used an SM-57 on the snare instead of one of Brandon's drum mikes and the kick sounds lots better. The guitar part may stay but we've got to record Joel's vocal, the other guitar parts, background vocals and maybe we can get someone to play a keyboard part - probably a B-3 sound.

2 weeks

2005-12-03T17:25:00.000-08:00

Wow, I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks since I posted. Thanksgiving got in the way and then Brandon couldn't practice for about a week. On top of everything else, it was the end of the month and I had to do the weekly and monthly bids for the casinos we service. And I had the Holiday Shopping issue of the newsletter to get out. We got together last Tuesday and did a preliminary mix of "Smells Like". You can listen to it here.
The song is kind of of empty without any background vocals or any sort of keyboard pad so we decided to record Joel's acoustic guitar pushed up to a speaker. We will use the output of his pickup running through a direct box. I've done this before and you never know what you will get. I'll post that as soon as we get it done.

The vocals are done!

2005-11-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

The vocals are done on “Smells Like”. All I have to do is record my bass part and I’m going to do that tonight. Last night, we just had to record the last chorus where Joel really sings out. We tried it with the pad on the mike but it didn’t sound right so we took the pad off and Joel had to step back when he really hit it hard. It came out pretty good. We comped together two different vocal performances: one with the verses sung and one with the verses more conversational. You can listen to them here – Sung verses and Conversational verses. I’d be interested to hear what you think. Getting the snare to crack has been a bit frustrating but I think I have it figured out. I took the snare out of the kit and put it on it’s own output with a delay rather than reverb and it is starting to stand out now. I just have to work on the eq to get the ring out.

I’ve been doing some posting on some the Internet message boards relating to music and recording and I discovered something interesting – the guys in the Usenet groups are unmerciful when it comes to critiquing things. It was very helpful because I was able to accept their criticism and apply some changes to my site. I am also very careful when I throw something out to make sure that I don’t embarrass myself. “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”. Anyway, I’ll post when I do the bass track

Are we snake-bit?

2005-11-12T06:36:00.000-08:00

Are we snake-bit or something? We were supposed to go on at 10 last night. I called the club owner - who happens to be a customer of mine- and asked him if thatÂs how things were still going to be. He says, "Well, The Gunshy brought someone else with him so we have to make room for 4 on the bill. I'll call you at 7 to let you know how it's going to go". I thought, "Ok, so we go on at 11 instead of 10, no big deal". I didn't hear back from him at 7 so I called him back and he said they were waiting for us to do a sound check. That meant we were going on first. So I had to call Joel to tell him we were going on at 9 and rush over there. It gets better. We did our sound check and had about 30 minutes to spare before 9 so we played a game of pool and generally hung out. There was no one there other than the band that was going to play after us - "Bitter Hearts". 9 o'clock came and nobody was there. I asked the guy working the door what he wanted us to do. "Wait until 9:30". So we played another game of pool and when 9:30 came around still there was nobody there. The sound guy says wait until 10 so we went on at 10 and there was still nobody there. We played our entire set except for 2 songs and still nobody showed up. In the middle of all that, Joel starts playing "Caroline" in the wrong key and I couldn't figure out where he was. I was able to sing along with him but I couldn't get the right key until the song was almost over. "Sex and Candy" went pretty well considering we just learned it this week. I was flabbergasted that on a Friday night, there was nobody out. Scary! Well, I don't think we're going to play there unless we can get a better guarantee or something. I don't mean money, I mean people - maybe they ought to sell tickets or something.
Anyway, we're going to get together Tuesday and figure out a game plan. I think we ought to concentrate on trying to play in Lafayette about once a month or so. We still have to finish recording the vocals and bass on "Smells Like" and start recording some new material. Funny thing is that I had a bad feeling about last night, I don't know where it came from but something kept telling me that the gig was going to be a flop. I found a cool guitar instruction site-Click here This guy says he can unlock the guitar in one weekend - check it out. Any way, I'll post the results of our next recording sessions as we do them and maybe somebody will notice that and want to sign us or something - Yeah, right and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

I Lied

2005-11-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

I lied - the previous post was supposed to be posted yesterday. I'm not going to make any excuses, I just didn't do it. The Colts WON !!!! I really think this is Peyton's year. He seemed to have a swagger last night I've never seen before. Practice tonight was pretty good - the vocals are coming together nicely. We're the second band on the bill so we should be playing in front of some people. Zack's got a new mixer so I'm hoping we don't have to use our monitors. Anyway, we'll be getting together again Thursday to rehearse - I'll try to record something then. Oh, yeah - I got news on Google today with my press release - check it out here

It's been almost a whole week

2005-11-07T12:02:00.000-08:00

Wow, it’s been almost a whole week since I posted. We didn’t practice Thursday like I thought we would so recording the acoustic guitar part for “Smells Like” had to wait until Saturday afternoon. It came out great – I recorded two tracks – one with my Shure KSM27 pointed at about the 12th fret and the other with a Roland DR-20 emulating a U-87 as a room mic placed behind Joel and to his right with the capsule pointed at the top bout of the guitar – a beautiful Gibson J-150. I recorded two passes and combined the KSM-27 from the first take with the emulated U-87 from the second take – you can listen to just the guitar here . I’m going to try to record the bass track this evening – before “THE GAME”(Indie vs NE) , of course. I'll post the whole song with bass after I complete it. Brandon came over about 3:00 and we rehearsed for about an hour and a half. Sounding great – maybe I’ll post a live song or two from rehearsal later this week. Also, our gig at Joe’s is Friday and I can’t wait to actually play in front of some real live people. The last gig was fun but there was nobody there.

Smells Like - Live

2005-11-02T08:07:00.000-08:00

The rehearsal last night was amazing. We were all on headphones with Brandon in the isolation booth on drums and Joel playing his guitar through my GT-3 straight to the board. Being able to hear yourself makes a huge difference. We went through the whole set list and then recorded “Smell Like” as the last song. The drum track with the scratch guitar and vocals are located here. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I think the snare needs to crack a bit more during the chorus. Some compression and EQ may help a bit and I may end up replacing the snare via midi. I wanted to record the bass track as well but I screwed up and didn’t sync the Yamaha and the computer together properly. Not a big deal – I can record that part in about 10 minutes.
In other news, the newsletter came out and seems to be pretty well received. You can view it here. I learned a bit of internet protocol concerning email addresses. If you’re sending out something to a number of people, you should but the addresses in the BCC field and send the email to yourself so that no-one can see each others addresses. I kind of pissed one guy off and another guy was kind enough to tell me how to do it. We’ll be getting together Saturday afternoon to rehearse and do some more recording. We’ll probably record the acoustic guitar part and I should have the bass part done by then. I’ll post the results of that session as soon as I can

It's Always a Killer

2005-10-30T17:20:00.000-08:00

I would have liked to post before now but the end of the month is always a killer for me at work. Things are progressing nicely as far as the rehearsals for our show on the 11th. A good part of the day was spent setting up to record a couple of songs to include on an EP to sell. We have two weeks until the show and we haven’t recorded anything yet. I’m going to set it up so that we can record the drums (6 tracks), a scratch vocal, a scratch guitar and a bass part. That will be 9 tracks, which means I have to press my Yamaha AW2816 into service. I’ve got them sync’d together via MTC and STMP so that when I press record in Sonar, the AW2816 starts up and records in step with Sonar. I’ve done this before but I had to go through a dry run last night just to check things out because I haven’t use the Yamaha in a while. For you techies out there, the setup is as follows:

Motherboard – Intel 865 PERL
Processor – Intel 2.4HT
Memory – 512 MB
Hard Drive 1 – 20MB
Hard Drive 2 – 40MB
Recording Software – Sonar 4 Studio Edition
Audio Interface - Roland Studio Package (includes Roland VM-3100 Pro and Roland RPC-1 PCI card)
Outboard Mixer – Mackie 1604 VLZ – connected to Roland VM-3100 Pro with an 8-channel TRS to TRS recording snake via direct outs
DAW – Yamaha AW2816 – connected via midi to VM-3100 Pro
Other gear – Boss GT-3, Line 6 Bass Pod, several Shure SM-58’s, several Shure SM-57’s, 3 Roland DR-20 mic’s, Edirol UA-100, Roland A-30 Midi
Controller, Boss Dr. Synth DR – 330(a relic), Fender P-bass, Fender
Mexi-Strat (a great guitar), Fender Pink Paisley Telecaster (an even
better guitar), and a Roland V-Club set.
Miscellaneous – Vibra Slap 2 (awesome !), tambourines, cabasa, etc.

The Yamaha worked fine as I expected it would even though the CD burner went on the fritz a while back and I had to buy a SCSI drive to replace it. I will post the tracks as we record them. We’ll be recording our drummer’s kit through hit CAD drum mic’s. We’ve recorded his kit before – check it our at our website – www.catchtheband.com .
In other news, the first edition of the Your Home Studio Dot Com newsletter will be coming in out in the coming days. Email me @ newsletter@yourhomestudio.com if you would like to subscribe.

This Afternoon

2005-10-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

I just this afternoon got a chance to sit down and try to post something. I’m still working on the article on compression. I recorded a guitar part and posted some files both compressed and uncompressed with overdrive and without to illustrate the sustain that compression can introduce when used correctly. I used the compressor included with Sonar 4 and also the amplifier simulator set to the “Marshall” setting. The files are as follows

Clean Guitar – no compression

Clean Guitar – compression

Overdrive Guitar – no compression

Overdrive Guitar - compression

Let me know what you think as far as if the examples really show the difference between a uncompressed and compressed guitar. I’m going to use the same file for eq, delay and reverb. For chorus, phase, and flanging, I’m probably going to use some strumming. I also intend to use a kick drum for compression and maybe some vocals for some other effects. I will take the whole mix of “Smells Like” to illustrate mastering with compression, limiting, Multiband compression and mastering equalization as well as just eq in general.

We’ll be really kicking it in to high gear to get “Smells Like” recorded by the time of the gig. I hope I can get everything updated as things go along so you’ll be able to see the progression. The compression article should be up on the website tomorrow evening so I guess I’ll post again to update.

Busy

2005-10-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

I know it’s been a couple of days since my last post but I’ve been pretty busy over the last few days. I had a sound reinforcement gig Tuesday night for a local hospital. It was boring as hell but it pays pretty good - $350 for about 3 hours work. If I could get 3 or 4 jobs like that a week, I’d quit my day job, although that wouldn’t leave me much time to do any recording or rehearsing with the band. I started working on an article about compression for the first newsletter for the website and I’m having a hard time finding out the history of audio compression. I’m not sure if it was something ported over from the radio side or if it was designed for recording use and crossed over into radio. If anyone has any information concerning that, I would love to know because I don’t want to put some bullshit in the article and then have someone call me down on it later. We are rehearsing again tonight and I haven’t had a chance to practice my vocal parts but I think I can wing it. Brandon hopefully will have listened to his CD’s and worked out his parts. We’re probably going to discuss the recording schedule for the two songs we plan to have produced by the next gig. It’s going to be pretty much balls to the wall as far as I can tell. I’m planning on posting the tracks as we cut them so you can see the process. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot – check out these two websites Live Plasma and Pandora. They’re both kind of variations on a theme. I can’t really say more than that – just check them out.

2005-10-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

We went out to listen to my daughter’s band; “People” play at a restaurant/bar called Lafayette’s in Lafayette, LA. They did a great job considering they hadn’t all played together in some time. One of the guitarists, BJ, just got out of school for underwater welding and is working now. He had to ride out the last hurricane on the crew boat and his car got flooded. My daughter called me Thursday to rant about how she never gets any respect from guys at music stores when she goes in to buy strings, etc. They always think she’s buying them for her boyfriend or they are really patronizing. I had a bit of an epiphany on the drive from Shreveport to Lafayette concerning this. Women have to be men if they want to get any respect in the music business, especially popular music. Look back at the women who have made a name for themselves in popular music and you’ll understand. Joan Jett is probably the quintessential example of this but you also have Pat Benetar, the Wilson Sisters from Heart, and Madonna (Yes, Madonna – she dresses like a woman and oozes sex appeal but in an aggressive push in your face, don’t screw with me kind of way). I could go on but I think it’s kind of interesting to look at the ones who don’t fit that type or have changed from that and it makes it even more interesting. Britany Spears for instance, no one takes her seriously that is a music aficionado. She’s the very definition of what guys want in a girl – sexy, blonde, maybe didn’t do so good on her SAT’s – you know what I mean. Actually, I think if she is going to continue after the birth of her baby, she’s going to have to toughen up a bit and try to appeal to a broader audience. A good example of someone who changed her persona and lost her fan base is Liz Phair. A year or so ago, she produced a record with one of these pop production teams because she said it was a financial necessity. It had the exact opposite reaction from what she expected. Not only did she alienate her existing fan base, she didn’t really break through and now she’s a bit like a ship without a rudder. I hope she figures out that you have to carve out and own your niche to have any respect from the serious music buying public. I have often wondered what happened to that crop of really great women artists came out in the mid 90’s, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole, etc. I think I understand now. As soon as they showed that they were really women, all the interest faded away. There’s a whole new crop of women out there who understand this and are defining themselves to their fans for what they are and I think in the long run honesty will win out.

Anyway, enough of that. We got together Thursday night for rehearsal and it went pretty well. At least, I think Brandon knows what he needs to do now. We recorded each one of the songs with Joel singing Brandon’s part so that he can listen to that and practice with it. We listened to “Smells Like” and Joel wants to rerecord the whole thing because he doesn’t like his vocal on it and if we were to record another vocal part we could get some problems because during the last chorus, when Joel really sings out, his vocal bleeds into the guitar track (you can hear it if you listen to the guitar track here). I’m not sure how were going to set this up because Brandon’s kit is in the vocal booth, but I’ll figure something out. I’m going to start putting together the newsletter for the website soon so sign up for it if you haven’t already. I plan to have a section on new recording products, a short tutorial on different aspects of recording (effects, eq, etc) and maybe my musings on the state of the music industry. Look for it around the first of November.

The Tuesday Evening Standard

2005-10-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

The Tuesday Evening Standard - That's the name of the band(for now). We had rehearsal tonight and we all decided that's what we would go with. The website will be eveningstandardmusic.com. Rehearsal was a bit difficult as we are trying to add some vocal parts to our originals and everybody's not on the same page. Brandon was trying to follow my lead and I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing but when I hear him kind of hunting around for where he needs to be, it throws me off and then the whole thing goes to shit. Plus I don't know how comfortable he is singing and playing drums at the same time. I find it almost effortless to sing when I play drums but playing bass and singing is another thing altogether. I can do it but I really have to pay attention or I'll either lose my place in the song or sing something off key. So Thursday when we get together, we are going to just work on vocals against Joel playing acoustic guitar- no other instruments and we'll see what we can do with that. I'm anxious to get that behind us so we can rehearse like we usually do and then finish recording "Smells Like" and "I'm Doin' Fine". Not much else to report so TTFN

Cleaning up

2005-10-10T19:13:00.000-07:00

The track including the drums is up. It took me a little longer than I expected to clean them up and I had some catching up to do this weekend like clean up my yard from Hurricane Rita. Click here to listen to it. It’s recorded in midi from my Roland V-Club kit and the sound module is the software synth provided with Sonar 4 studio. It’s pretty good although I’m not crazy about that splash cymbal. I’m interested in what people think of the rim shot instead of the regular snare after the vocal starts. We are going to record Brandon’s kit starting this week and I’ll post those tracks as we progress. I got a visit from one of my former clients this evening. He has a real unique style and I will post the tracks from those sessions as they proceed. I will probably play drums for him as his drummer flaked out on him. I’ll try to get a picture illustrating my recording technique I mentioned a couple of posts so you can see what I’m talking about. I did update the site to link to the blog but I decided to wait until after we’ve recorded “Smells Like” to have a complete page with maybe some illustrations and/or pictures.

Just Couldn't Sleep

2005-10-08T03:22:00.000-07:00

It’s 5AM and I’ve been up since about 3:30. Just couldn’t sleep I guess. Anyway, as promised, the individual files for the vocal and the 2 guitar tracks (same guitar – 2 mic’s) are on the server.

     Vocal File
     Guitar One
     Guitar Two

I had a bit of a time trying to convert them to .wma files because I stupidly burned the files on the CD as .wav files so instead of going back to computer in the studio and re-burning a CD properly, I transferred them to hard drive on my laptop, burned them as an audio CD, and them ripped them using Windows Media Player. Let this be lesson for you – pay attention and you won’t have to do things twice. While I was waiting for the files to upload, I went to the studio and cleaned up the drum track. This won’t be the final drum track as it’s a little sloppy and I think Brandon will do a better job anyway. I recorded the drum track using my Roland drum kit and the sound module playing the kit is the one that came with Sonar 4 studio. It’s sounds pretty good for a software synth. I’m putting up so you get an idea of what the feel of the song is going to be like. We’re pretty well committed to doing the set on the 11th as an almost exclusively original set unless it’s a cover that we really do our way. “The Gunshy” seems to be a determined individualist and I don’t think doing a bunch of covers is really appropriate in this situation.  I’ll put the drum track up a little later today along with another copy of the song with the drum track included. Remember, you can sign up for the newsletter at newsletter@yourhomestudio.com and please don’t forget to visit the web page and let me know what you think about the website.

Ok, I know I promised...

2005-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Ok , I know I promised to upload those other files yesterday, but Joel and I worked on some vocal parts for some of our originals that we are putting into the set and after that we played Madden 2005 ( I lost – again). I promise that I will get those uploaded tonight and get the drum track up by the end of the weekend. It’s finally turned cool here which will be a blessing in the studio. Even though the studio is air-conditioned, it’s not very well insulated to the outside and it can get pretty hot in there especially when we are rehearsing. I am also planning to update my website this weekend to include links to this blog and put a new page up detailing the recording process of “Smells Like”. I would appreciate some input on how you like(or don’t like-although I don’t think that’s possible) the song and if you have any ideas regarding arrangement. We are kind of going for a stripped down sound but I definitely am not going to cut my nose off to spite my face. I’ll post again as soon as I’ve uploaded the audio files.

2005-10-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

As promised, I uploaded the .wma file for "Smells Like". It's encoded for Windows Media Player at 128bits/sec so unless you have a really slow connection it should sound pretty good. Tomorrow, I'll upload the individual files so you can listen to each one. If you listen closely at the beginning, you'll hear Joel and I discussing the previous take and saying that the previous one was uneven in tempo. That will disappear when it comes time to mix down and of course the song will be trimmed
so that the it starts after the count-in. The guitar and vocal were recorded at the same time using a technique of my own invention. I placed a music stand with the shelf part horizontal over the guitar mic's and a shield placed behind the vocal mic. The results are fairly impressive with the vocal only bleeding over to guitar mic's when Joel really sings out at the end of the song. I think if you pan the track either right or left fully, you can probably hear it if you don't want to wait until tomorrow.

2005-10-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

Correction : Catch will be at L'il Joe's on November 11th opening for "The Gunshy". Kind of a Tom Waits/Bob Dylan kind of sound judging from the the songs on the website. We are in the middle of trying to find a new name for the band so any suggestions will be helpful. The leading candidate so far is "The Tuesday Evening Standard". I had thought of "Odette Calling" but some one reminded me that "Odette" is the name of the Swan Princess so I guess that's out. We are going to try and finish recording "Smells Like" and another original so we can try to sell some EP's at the show in November. I will post the links to the songs as we record them so you can see the progression. We already have a scratch vocal, a guitar track and some drums that I played(not very well). I think we will let Brandon, our drummer, record the drums on his kit and then I will record my bass line before we do the final vocal. I will put the link to the scratch vocal and guitar track up tomorrow after I upload the tracks to my website - "Your Home Studio Dot Com". This should be a good illustration on how a recording is constructed as the song is really just vocal, drums, bass and guitar.

2005-10-03T12:46:00.000-07:00

Monday - not the worst Monday of my life. We (my band - CATCH) had a gig last Wednesday night at L'il Joe's Tavern across the street from Centenary College. Our set went from 9 to 10 and then this gal(Ill Ease) who was a solo performer from NY played 3 songs for about 30 minutes which were basically her playing a riff on guitar and letting a loop station play it while she played a drum rhythm and then back to the guitar to play on top of that. Not really my kind of stuff. I don't mind loop based things as long as they go somewhere but this definately did not. The last band was "The Gaslights" from Kansas City. They've got a Loretta Lynn meets the Ramones kind of thing goin' on. Very different from everything else I've heard in the Shreveport area which seems to be the barely discernable vocals screamed with the mic half way down their throat. I certainly hope this is the direction things are going. One of the things that came out of that gig is that we've got to finish recording "Smells Like". For the most part, it's the lyrics from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with a country kind of chord progression that moves into a jazzy kind of feel before it rocks out in the chorus. I've always believed in this song and we got a really good response. I think we'll be playing there again on the 20th of October. On the recording info front, I just posted an article at New Free Articles Dot Com entitled "Recording in the 21st century #1 - Home Music Recording Studio Necessities". I'll keep you posted on when the next one comes out. Please make sure you check out "Your Home Studio Dot Com" and let me know what you think. You can also sign up for the free newsletter while you're there.

My First Post

2005-10-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

As I sat this morning in my pajamas drinking coffee and looking at my email and website stats, it occurred to me that I could blog as well as anyone. So here I am. A little background information - 45 years old, happily married, one daughter about to turn legal, 2 dogs, one cat, 2 parrots, one cockatiel ....hmm am I forgetting something - No, I think that's about it. My day job is in the foodservice industry - I am the sales manager for a medium sized foodservice distributor in Shreveport, LA. For those of you who are not familiar with what a foodservice distributor does, we sell food and food related items to restaurants, hospitals, casinos, etc. It's not the most glamorous job in the world but it can be very rewarding when you work with customers who have built their businesses from a dream and understand what hard work, perserverence and a positive attitude are all about. Enough of that- this blog is about music and music production. I have been running my own home studio for about 6 years and while it never has provided enough income to eclipse my day job, the other rewards more than make up for it. I've met and worked with many different people from diverse backgrounds from real studio musicians to the rawest talent you can imagine and loved every minute of it. I decided a month or so ago to impart my "vast" knowledge to the newbies of the home recording studio world so I published Your Home Studio Dot Com - a basic tutorial on setting up and operating a home recording studio. I had a lot of fun putting it together and I plan to increase the scope to include more in - depth treatments of issues relating to recording and producing music in a home studio enviroment. I've got to go - My wife and I have two birthday parties to go to and we haven't bought any gifts yet.