{"id":35,"date":"2017-12-30T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-30T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/post\/2017\/12\/30\/Practice-til-your-hands-hurt"},"modified":"2017-12-30T12:30:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-30T12:30:00","slug":"practice-til-your-hands-hurt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/30\/practice-til-your-hands-hurt\/","title":{"rendered":"Practice \u2018til your hands hurt"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Finally, I think I got it down. In one take.<\/p>\n

Here’s a little video I made while (re)recording the bass:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9mB38yCU6D0<\/a><\/p>\n

The backing track is not final; it’s a special mix that keeps things simple and un-distracting.<\/p>\n

Now, with respect to that tone, here’s how it is achieved in the DAW:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studio-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}