Week 10, The Early Years

The tenth song is called The Early Years.YouTube link for iPhone

This song marks an interesting chapter in my adventure into high-tech lo-fi recording. This project has required me to establish some rules of operation to survive the weekly deadline. One of them is that when I sit down to record something, I better get a recording and be ready to live with it. I discovered the downside to that rule for this week’s song. When I tracked the guitars and bass in Sonoma Wire Works’  FourTrack app, I ended up setting the metronome to a tempo that I later couldn’t live with – it was a little too slow to bring out the intensity that I was going for. Feeling confident that there was an easy high-tech fix rather than just re-recording everything, I imported the tracks into Reaper, sped up the playback a nudge, and then rendered the mixdown to a stereo track that I then uploaded into the  MultiTrack app.

Easy fix, right? Not so fast (pun only slightly intended). The problem that occurred to me, only after getting this far and leaving myself a day or so left to work on the song, was that when I imported the vocal and drum tracks back into Reaper, having been recorded at the adjusted pitch and speed, they wouldn’t match up with the original tracks and would be subject to the same playback speed adjustment and be sped up twice. Since I’m not out to make chipmunk-core (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I had to figure out a way to get out of this jam without starting over. Thank goodness for Reaper. I’ve focused mostly on the iPhone apps so far, but I have to put a solid plug in here for Reaper. The software comes with the ability to adjust just about anything that you could possibly think of. To the benefit of my song, that includes the ability to change the rate of speed for any track in your project with or without adjusting the pitch. That was all that I needed. I just brought the playback speed setting back to zero and adjusted the original bass and guitar tracks up to the faster rate of speed (1.086 to be exact). That left me with a little more work to do to get the tracks aligned properly and I was set.

With all of that said, I think the song ended up sounding pretty good. Sure, I would probably go back and re-record a lot of it, but that’s the fun of this project. There’s no time to go back and mess with things because I have another song to do.

The song is just a quick little rock number. There are two identical guitar tracks, a third guitar track for the solo, a bass track, a drum track, and one vocal track. The guitar and bass tracks were recorded as usual with the custom break-out cable. For the drums, I wanted to keep it really simple and give the Blue Mikey another test on live drums. This time I located the Mikey above the kit and out in front only about two or three feet. This resulted in some clipping, but I worked with it for this song and beefed up the drums using a simulated tube compressor plug-in on the back end. You can hear what I’m talking about around the 1:10 minute mark where the music fades out and the drums are left with a weird little fill before the guitar solo comes in. I was having a lot of fun with the fill and the solo for this song, I hope that comes through, but I don’t imagine that Yngwie Malmsteen and Neil Peart will be very impressed. I recorded the vocals using the iPhone mic, and I purposely clipped the mic and got a nice little bit of distortion on the vocals.

This is the week that I’m going on a quick tour with The Karl Hendricks Trio. We’ll be playing Thursday the 12th in Columbus, OH at the Treehouse; Friday the 13th at the Bishop Bar in Bloomington, IN; and on Saturday the 14th at the Hideout in Chicago, IL with Bottomless Pit (ex Silkworm and Seam). We have the distinct pleasure playing all of these shows with the great Columbus band, The Kyle Sowashes. It remains to be seen if I’ll find a way to get next week’s song ready before the trip or how it will come together, but somehow I’ll get a song up at some point next week.

2 Comments to Week 10, The Early Years

Cat
November 12, 2009

Corey! Zach and I spent some time here tonight listening.

Are you doing this mostly on the third floor? Or in the kitchen?

I like this one….like the dirty guitar and the energy! yay!

project52
November 12, 2009

Thanks Cat. Drums are on the third floor, but most everything else has been either the dining room and kitchen. I did the vocals for this song in the living room while on the couch and next week’s song features my son’s mini guitar recorded in the bathroom.

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