Category: Studio Diary (Page 9 of 23)

Good news: New carpet is getting installed in the studio.
Bad News: I have to Pack up All The Things.

So that “new toy” I hinted at earlier showed up last week. A fine product of Tech 21 NYC, the SansAmp Bass Driver DI. It took some tweaking of knobs, and reading of the manual, but in short order I had the sound I was looking for. This is the closest thing to a “Sounds-Good-er” pedal I’ve ever used. Currently replacing the guide bass on the latest project using the Agile Guitars / Brice Defiant 53437 bass – and it is awesome.

With the studio basically empty except for my desk and DAW, I spent a couple of hours “comping” which means listening to multiple takes (of my vocals, yuk) and selecting the best parts out of which to construct a single, “best performance”. Cakewalk Software’s SONAR 2015 has some nice tools specifically for this process, however to date, I don’t use them in my specific quirky workflow. They are still awesome, though.

This week is all about recording vocals and backing vocals.

And did you know that the word “lyrics” comes from “to be accompanied by lyre”? It’s obvious in hindsight. I have no lyre tracks in this current project. Unless you count guitar. There are many of those.

Pro-Tip: When your guitar with active electronics starts emitting static and weird “pops” and other strange noises, try replacing the battery.

This month I’m preparing to record some vocal takes, but real-world work is not allowing much time. I have a bunch of takes sitting in the DAW that need to be reviewed and discarded. I’m not looking forward to it because I know it wasn’t a good session. I need to re-do them.

On the bright side, a new toy should be showing up soon. Check back next month.

I’ve been listening to Tiger Moth Tales and Eric Norlander’s Galactic Collective and feeling dispirited as a result. They do this stuff so well.

The project continues… I originally went into this thinking I would use just one guitar for all the parts. However the Telecaster and Gibson L6-S have crashed the party.

The Telecaster is just so good for rhythm tracks, it’s unnatural.

On that subject, here’s a sign that the project might be going off the rails: The playback sounds awesome… and you noticed that you’ve muted the keyboards buss.

Speaking of keyboards, I see that the VAXMIDI Keyboard Kickstarter from Infinite Response has reached its goal. Looking forward to receiving the kit-set.

“Too clever by half” is when you randomly insert 7/8 bars in a 4/4 section, only to find that if you don’t make smart choices about the drum track, it sounds like crap.

I’ve been grappling with the ‘flu this month. On the other hand, I have a new version of Cakewalk SONAR to play with, yay!

Also: it turns out that “noodling on the bass” for a few minutes every other day is not a suitable regimen for maintaining finger calluses. On the positive side, the new bass track I’ve laid down is sounding pretty good.

Last time I took my Chapman Stick out of the case I noticed the foam was deteriorating fast, losing its “spring” and behaving rather like underbaked dough. And it would get sticky if I rubbed it with my fingers. Clearly not a good situation.

So, a quick Amazon order of replacement foam sheets, and some application of craft knife, and we have a replacement:

So here we have a lousy picture of an Agile Defiant 53437:

 It’s not a trick of perspective; those frets really do fan out along the fingerboard. The bass B string has a scale length of 37″, while the top G string is 34″.