Progressive Rock Artist seeks Audience
Mastering on all tracks finished so far is going well. I’ve identified a few problems with the mixes – not many – and addressed them, so that’s good.
Slaying the Dragon is almost completed, instrumentally, but the lyrics are giving me pause. So I’m currently playing a karaoke mix in my car and singing along and it’s taking me somewhere slightly different than from where I started. So, there’s some on-going work to do here.
I’ve completed the album cover artwork. It’s getting really close!
I’ve finished the instrument tracking for Slaying the Dragon, including figuring out the solo section. Downside: I currently hate this tune, I’m hearing it in my sleep for crying out loud. I need an earworm pill.
I’ve decided to re-do the vocals, the guide vox just ain’t good enough, and I have some ideas for tweaking the lyrics.
This means that the August deadline probably isn’t going to be achieved. Oh well. It won’t be the first time I’ve blown a deadline.
Work continues on Slaying The Dragon. In the last month I’ve:
Still to do:
Over the last week I’ve mostly been tweaking the Chapman Stick track, and reworking some of the drum fills to get a nice, tight rhythm section.
Not perfect yet
As a break, I went back to Future Imperfect and decided that most of the L6-S lead guitar needs to be benched in favor of the BlueShifter, so that basically all of the guitar is performed on the same instrument. I’ve retained the L6-S on the outro, which is fine because it segues into the Finale which is all L6-S anyway.
I know: No-one but me cares about these things. It’s all just guitar, right? Wrong. These different instruments have character – even if it is only in my own head – which instruct the performances that end up in the track.
It is easy for me to be infatuated with the sound of the L6-S, but on reflection I could tell that there were two “characters” of guitar in the song when really there should only have been one.
And since the BlueShifter only shows up on one track on this album, it should have that track mostly to itself, I think.
Since finishing up “Future Imperfect” in February, I’ve been going back over the other components in the “Strange But True Steel Tree” suite and tidying up a few loose ends in the Prologue, Interludes, and Finale sections.
The song “Strange but True” became a problem, because I want to re-write the lyrics and re-title it “The Steel Tree”. In the process of doing that, I decided I needed to re-record the drums, guitar, and bass. Now it’s just waiting for me to finish up the lyrics and get the vocal re-recorded.
I also decided “Head in the Game” needed a third go-over, with some tweaks to the drums and a more aggressive bass. Then I went crazy and re-recorded all the guitars, using the Ibanez 540s instead of the telecaster. It’s sounding better, I think.
Now it’s time to return to the last remaining song on the album: Slaying The Dragon. I’m currently in the middle of re-recording the Chapman Stick and acoustic guitar.
I really think I have a shot at finishing this project up this year. (I mean the album, not the song, cheeky!)
After the album was released, I moved my notes about each song into a dedicated page which you may find here:
Fruit of the Steel Tree : Future Imperfect
Alternatively, follow the album link in the main menu above on this page.
I don’t consider this track to have weird vocals or anything but after listening to it, Eldest Brother asked me what I’d done to my voice. So here’s the process:
First, I recorded 6 or 7 takes of the vocals. I use a nice cardoid condenser microphone with a pop screen but no additional FX, accepting the natural reverberation of my studio room.
I cut the tracks into separate clips for each contiguous lyric phrase, and selected the best to construct a single best take for each verse, and two best takes for the choruses. Not surprisingly, usually I ended up selecting from take 2 or take 3.
After assembling the vocal tracks, I use the Tools menu in SONAR to run Adobe Audition 1.5 as an external wave editor, and clean up each clip – removing any obvious spikes and reducing “breath” sounds, not to eliminate but just to reduce them a bit. This step could have been done using a compressor FX during the recording, but I’ve tried doing that, and I prefer to do it manually. (I probably just don’t know what I’m doing with the compressor parameters.)
At this point I cheated very slightly and used a pitch correction tool to fix the worst vocal glitches. It was usually just two or three slightly flat notes per verse. The tool in SONAR is called V-Vocal and although it has an ‘auto-tune’ mode, I don’t use it. I fix the flat notes manually, basically just moving them enough so that you no longer notice the flatness, rather than making them perfect. Subtle is best for this sort of thing. It’s easy to inadvertently introduce noticeable pitch artifacts so I always listen carefully to keep it natural.
For the choruses I panned the two takes 25% left and right for a “double-tracked” sound.
The verses are the single take, panned center. I also made a duplicate of the verse vocal track, and applied a “Guitar Amp Distortion” FX plugin to it and reduced the volume, so what you hear in each verse is the natural tone plus just a hint of the distorted version, giving the verses a slight gritty edge.
I have separate busses for the vocal reverb and vocal delay effects, and I use buss send envelopes on the vocal tracks so that I can be precise about what parts of the track have reverb and delay applied. That’s why only certain words in the phrase are accented with echo delay, and only certain parts of certain words get reverb’d. The effect is to make the lyric flow and sound good without drowning it.
Finally, and most obviously, in this track I have duplicated certain select phrases from the chorus and placed them into a separate track, using the Pentagon I virtual synth as an FX plugin to get the vocoder effect (the technique is explained here). I’ve used a custom saw wave patch for this, one with a wide frequency range that works well with the vocoder.
Well, that trick worked, mostly. I copied the nice, tight drum track from the 120bpm project into the original, 135bpm project, and started re-recording the bass, locking in to the new timing.
Here’s a teaser, from the end of the guitar solo where everything is getting quite excitable:
Just listening to this, I can hear some places where the drum velocity levels should be tweaked a bit. The toms are a bit loud and brash, and could do with a little less reverb.
Still… it’s much better. Now to adjust all the other instruments to fit!
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