Category: Studio Diary (Page 6 of 23)

I took Unit 26 with me into work, and took some pictures from the car park, before leaving at the end of the day. I don’t think I’ll use these for the album cover but they were the right kind of whimsical.

It’s definitely time I posted something here. Many things have been happening.

“You will be… upgraded”

Windows 1803 forced its way on to my audio workstation, like a door-to-door Cyberman, despite my best efforts to avoid it. The only side-effect I’ve noticed has been that my computer can no longer come out of “sleep mode”. This is very annoying, and I’m not the only one to have the problem.

It is possible that the update is not 100% compatible with the BIOS on my now 8-year old unsupported Dell Studio XPS 9000 tower. That seems to be the consensus.

I can live with a computer with insomnia. It boots in 30 seconds, and I usually ensured that all apps are closed before putting it to sleep anyway, so it’s hard to get too annoyed about this.

Speaking of upgrades

I’ve been working on the next album. In this age of Pandora and Spotify, the idea of releasing an “album of songs” might be considered passé , with the caveat that, if it is released on vinyl, then you get a pass for being a neo-hipster, or something.

I’m not sure if I’m working towards a physical CD or not, but as a firm believer in pretentious  “concept albums”, I am planning a collection of songs, some of which have a common theme.

That theme is “upgrades will fuck you up”. My experience described above is just another data point in a very busy scatter plot.

For several years the working title for this new album has been “Other Points of View” but I think that will change. I have something in mind but I will let it percolate before committing.

This month (actually last month but I’m running late) I came up with an idea for a short song to open the album. It’s a five-voice chorale that, I admit, is somewhat inspired by the opening track on Rick Wakeman’s No Earthly Connection but I think it is its own thing. Call it an homage at most.

I had a couple of weeks away from work this month, and furiously worked out the harmonies and sang the parts and I’m currently finalizing the production.

The idea is for the 30 second track to start out like an old-timey wax recording and gradually progress to pristine digital stereo, thus manifesting the “upgrade” concept. However If I don’t like the results, I’ll just go for a clean 44.1/24 production straight through.

Tik Tok, Tik Tok… The cycle renews

“Kill your darlings”. Who said this? It’s not just good advice for aspiring writers, whomever said it first.

The other track I’ve been working on this month has had a more tortuous history than most. I’ve tried to produce it “for reals” at least four times prior to this, but for whatever reason, I’ve never succeeded in completing it. I’m not sure why. It dates back to 2002 which actually makes it one of my recent projects. Yeah, laugh.

When I took stock of where this project was at, I found numerous project folders, in numerous locations, all in various degrees of completeness. Each of them substantially different in content and each contained some really nice ideas and arrangements. Some had vocals; others did not, but had good instrumentation or solos or other things.

In 2012 my brother visited from New Zealand and I had optimistic thoughts of having him laying down some keyboard tracks – it’d be just like old times!

Alas, that’s a Big Ask, and although we had some fun for an afternoon, it ended up stalling that version of the project because I wanted to keep as much of Walter’s contributions as possible, and it didn’t really work out.

I collated the various project files under a common parent and took stock:

Then I worked through each project, taking notes on what was working in each one. There is no way everything could be included in a final project. I began to appreciate again why it has been so hard to work on this project and how I got to this point.

Too many good ideas. Some of them have to be jettisoned. I have to “kill my darlings”, even though they are special.

And perhaps this can only be done after we’ve gained some perspective. At this point I have confidence that pruning down a composition can actually produce a better final result; and also I’m confident that deleting a “really cool section with great instrumentation and performances” doesn’t mean that I won’t come up with something just as good or better in the future.

So I took the version of the project from 2015 and viciously pruned it back, keeping the drums and some guitar. Then, after listening to the very earliest versions from 2003, I identified what made them sound good  – it was a really crunchy bass sound.

So I re-recorded the bass, this time foregoing pride of finger picking, and used a pick and the neck pickup to get a kind of John Wetton-y thing. (Rabbit hole alert. This is good too. Arghh.)

Then I went back to 2012 and salvaged the “hammond” and rhodes… figured out what they were playing and re-recorded them.

OK now we’re cooking. The awesome synth solo on the 2010 project is worth keeping but let’s see if we can use the Novation PEAK for it instead because the Roland Fantom is packed away in the garage and, oh, using a different instrument means that we need to perform it differently… it’s still good. Better.

Seeing as I had the microphone out I’ve been working out harmony vocals and re-recording them as well.

At this point, I have to transfer the new vocal tracks from my temporary tracking project into the 2018 version, then finish up lead guitar… and we may have a winner.

After years of threatening to invade, and then backing off…. the Toks may have actually Invaded.

The invention of a new piece, enabled their construction
A genetic constitution was figured out
Tools could be mounted: diversity of function
Advantage evolution: opposable snout

– The Toks Invade Bogland

After videoing the process of recording a bass track using the Chapman Stick,  as an experiment I did the same for the next couple of tasks: Replacing the previous organ track with a one-take performance on the Roland VK-8; and replacing the lead synth track with a performance using the Novation PEAK synthesizer.

In both cases I’m replacing a virtual instrument (VST Plugin) with a real, live, instrument performance, although I admit the distinction is a bit fuzzy and arbitrary. Whatever.

Why stop there? Indeed. So I re-recorded some guitar tracks just for fun. Now we have enough material to make an interesting (?) video. Also, an opportunity to get more into the KdenLive video editing application.

Problem #1 is getting everything in sync.

Problem #2 is deciding how to put the thing together. There are a lot of possible solutions, with varying degrees of “feels right”. I ended up with this:

This post has nothing to do with new versions of Windows 10, except perhaps for the delay in getting it published. I don’t know what the story is with 1803 or 1804 or whatever it turns out to be, but I’m sure Microsoft are working hard to prepare it for release.

I’m also sure it will be packed with features that I, as a "Creator", don’t give a sh*t about. Just like the last "Creator" release.

So, what’s new this month? Quite a bit, actually:

• I installed Reaper 5.77 and watched most of Kenny Gioia’s video tutorials;
• I migrated one of my "works in progress" from SONAR into a Reaper project.

This was actually pretty straight-forward, considering. Creating the empty project in Reaper was trivial – all the VST instruments and effects are available, and I haven’t used very many plugins that are locked to SONAR-only.

The MIDI data can be exported as a MIDI Type 1 file, which keeps the tracks distinct and retains the time offset of each clip. Be warned, however, that muted clips will be exported as unmuted. So there is some preparation required of separating the tracks so that muted and un-muted are on different tracks.

Then, you can open a .mid file in Reaper in a separate project tab, and select all clips in a track and paste them into the new project, positioning the paste point at the start of the timeline.

.WAV data is migrated differently, using SONAR’s export as Broadcast Wave feature. Again, muted clips need some special handling if you want to retain them, because they will be exported as silent (empty) clips.

I plan to continue working on this project in Reaper and see how it goes.

What else happened?

• BandLab acquired Cakewalk’s SONAR-related IP from Gibson;
• BandLab released the 64-bit core of SONAR Platinum as a free download to BandLab users.

Uh, okay. I’ll be honest and say, up until this moment, I’d never heard of BandLab. They seem to be some kind of cloud-based music collaboration outfit. But apparently their pockets are big enough to allow them to expand their market and include a "real" digital audio workstation in their product range.

Releasing it as a free download for registered users? That’s… quite cool.

So:

• I created a BandLab account;
• Installed the BandLab Assistant;
• Downloaded and installed the new "Cakewalk By BandLab" DAW.

It just worked. After tweaking some of the VST search paths, that is. Any project I chose to load up, opened without errors and played back correctly. However, it was about this time I realized it was 64-bit only.

Up until now I’ve been using the 32-bit version of SONAR, exclusively. All my VST plugins were 32-bit and things just worked, so I left it that way. If I was going to go ahead with Cakewalk By BandLab (from now on I’ll just call it Cakewalk), I would have to do a little work. 32-bit plugins are loaded and used, but there’s a translation layer involved that, ideally, I didn’t want to use.

• I installed SONAR Platinum x64, including the bundled VST plugins, ensuring to check the [x] 64 bit box instead of the [ ] 32-bit one.
• I opened the Plugin Browser in Cakewalk and made a note of all the 32-bit plugins, categorizing them as "installed but never use" and "installed and definitely used"
• I re-installed all the "definitely used" plugins and selected the 64-bit version where possible
• I removed all obsolete 32-bit VST files into a "retired" directory so that they would no longer be detected by the DAW

This left me with a pretty small list of 32-bit VST plugins that I’ve used historically and wish to keep on hand :

Instruments:

• Taurus (these days I have a patch on the Novation PEAK…)
• 4Front Rhodes (still has a nice compressed tone, I could replace but it sounds good as-is)
• esLine String (I will replace this with the Arturia Solina V probably)
• MinimogueVA (these days I have a patch on the Novation PEAK…)

Effects:

• VC-64 Vintage Channel Compressor (I can replace this eventually)
• LFX-1310 (Used for "vintage radio voice" and I could replace it eventually)
• Amplitude 3 (just in case I’ve used it on a Bass track)
• Glimmerverb (a really really nice shimmer reverb, could replace but hard to duplicate)

With the 64-bit upgrade process completed, it’s back to business as usual. I’ll stick with Cakewalk for most projects, for now, but I’ll continue using Reaper for that one project, just to see how it goes.

I have a back-log of tasks to work through, and first up is re-recording some solo synth lines in "Listen", using the Novation PEAK hardware synthesizer, which is awesome.

I’m having some difficulty making progress compositionally on a couple of new pieces, so I decided it was time to go back to some mostly-recorded works and see what needed to be done to get them ship-shape for album #2.

I should probably document my manifesto for album #2, but one of the tenets is to go back to the first demos for each piece, and respect the original instrumentation, if it makes sense to do so.

For the piece currently known as “Listen”, the bass riffs were developed shortly after I acquired my Chapman Stick, and certainly the early demos all featured it. So why, I have to ask, does my current work-in-progress project use a regular bass instead?

So I take out the Stick case from the back of the closet, and give it a good cleaning and a new set of strings (standard 10-string tuning). Usually I spend a long time trying to find the perfect recorded tone, but this time it came together pretty quickly (see below).

Another tenet in my manifesto is to avoid building up tracks by stitching together multiple takes. I’m not normally a “one-take” kind of guy, so this means, practice. And in the case of the Chapman Stick, which I hadn’t seriously played for a couple of years at least, lots of practice.

Finally, I think I got it down. In one take.

Here’s a little video I made while (re)recording the bass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mB38yCU6D0

The backing track is not final; it’s a special mix that keeps things simple and un-distracting.

Now, with respect to that tone, here’s how it is achieved in the DAW:

I’m recording a mono track (#6 in the picture) direct into computer’s audio interface via a Dual Channel PRO ST Preamp, to buffer and merge the two channels from the Stick into a single mono signal.

This mono signal is then routed in-the-box to an Aux Track “Stick FX” that contains an instance of Guitar Rig 4 virtual amplifier. A pre-FX Send duplicates the signal to a second Aux Track that allows me to mix in some of the clean, un-effected sound of the Stick.