Who doesn't like "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"? We've all played those four notes with glee at some stage. I'm pretty sure I have looked at fingerstyle for it many times, but never really knew what to do. Several years ago Yoni did a brilliant interpretation - most videos of him playing he sings it, but there is one video where he plays parts I-IV all instrumental and it is inspirational. A few weeks back I fiddled with it again, and committed to playing it Capo 3 and hanging onto a Em chord - so Gm. I didn't follow his video, I followed Songsterr, but I used his quiet arpeggio style. It's so good, so nice to play, but so much work. So I'm more just noodling, and playing it to my mate Steve at work on Friday mornings - it is one of his favourite songs as well.
I'll record a short for youtube of me playing part I on the new guitar. My first short was fun to do and seemed to be well received. Shorts don't have to be a full production, so it actually gives me license to just play bits of songs and have fun with it! The new guitar is purely for production at the moment, I still work out new stuff on an electric guitar because it is light on the fingers and quiet. I still rehearse on nylon. But wow the new guitar sounds nice and it will suit Shine On You Crazy Diamond part I beautifully. And I can record it both acoustically and plugged in and then mix up an amazing version in Reaper, and then mime along to it in a video :-)
Meanwhile I have been helping out the band "Solstice" record and mix their first EP. Apparently there are several bands called Solstice in the world, this is the one from Perth, Western Australia, that my daughter is in. As far as a recording studio goes I'm quite the amateur, no formal training just what feels right, what I've seen on YouTube and what I like in music. So I have ideas that are getting tweaked as I go.
The most recent session was the singer/songwriter/guitarist also filling in as drummer whom we shall call S1, and the singer/bassist, ie my daughter whom we shall call S2. My "recording studio" lives in a box...so I set it up in my family room, takes about half an hour, which includes setting up a digital drum kit. The heart of the studio is my laptop running reaper connected to a PreSonus Studio 18|24. I can track 8 instrument/mic inputs and the midi trigger from the drum kit. Heading out I drive a PA and a 4-way headphone splitter, which is a Behringer HA400 knock off. I don't often need the PA, we all just listen through the headphone splitter - which I have nice long cables for. This disadvantage is that we all listen to the same mix - but we can individually adjust levels with physical knobs on the HA400. It seems to work. I have discovered it is possible to send individual mixes out of the PreSonus, but it would require a bit of messy routing in Repear, a preamp on the line outs on the Personus, which are all mono so I'd have to pair them for stereo headphones.
So the headphone out -> 4 way headphone splitter with individual volume knobs is actually really good and really cheap to implement.
I thought that if I sent a click track we could build the foundations of the song with drums and bass, then add in guitar and vocals on top. I was wrong. The best way for the young ladies (16 and 17 year olds!) was for S1 to play guitar and sing a scratch vocal at the same time over a click track. We'd then record the bass on that, and the vocals on that, and then finally the drums. That seemed to work best!
I do have all the gear to record everyone at once - I have two SM58 Behringer clones and enough inputs for all the instruments. The drummer, S3, is definitely more of a live band scene, she can't lock into a click track and while it is possible to do everything without a click track, it is hard to do. So S1 was doing the drumming.
S1 brought her condenser microphone - it has a nice tone, but as expected, it hears _everything_. We ended up using it on the mix but I could hear the click track from S1's headphones :-) While mixing I found that the scratch vocals through the SM58 clonw were easily EQ'd to sound as good as the condenser mic, possibly the only issue with the dynamic was if S1 or S2 got too close at volume you'd hear boominess come through, which the condenser didn't get. I think practise would sort that out.
We got reasonable recordings of four original songs, S1 quite likes to mix so she took on the first one, I took on the second one, other two are waiting. I have discovered, after mixing maybe 50 songs now, that all my mixes end up sounding a bit like 70's rock. Which clearly is the sound that I like - my mix buddy laughs at it quite regularly. (Yes, I have a mix buddy, we send each other our mixes and critique them, it is really great for both of us, even though he is a far more experienced sound guy than I am!) I pick on his thumping modern day drum sounds, he picks on my weak 70's drum sounds...
Speaking of drums I've actually switched to Steven Slate drums, free version, to track drums. Whilst I love Old School Drum Tracking I have found that SSD5.5 matches hit velocity to samples of different hits which is just so good! So if you hit a drum at full midi velocity 127 you will get the hardest drum sample. But if you hit at midi velocity 10 you will get the softest drum sample. Not a volume scaled version of the hardest drum sample, but an actual recording of a drummer hitting a drum the softest he can. VST drums are amazing! My electronic drum kit will always be hooked up to a VST drum kit going forward.
Just to give The Algorithm something to do, here is a link to Solstice on Spotify
Worth a post in itself!
