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Week 46, The Weekend
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.For the first time in several weeks I’m getting a song up without franticly writing something at the last minute, and that’s a welcome change. We’ll see how long I can keep it up. With only six weeks left, I should be able to find the motivation.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this song. It came together pretty well – even with the slightly ridiculous dual guitar solo at the end. This is another track where the recordings were all made on the iPhone using the Alesis ProTrack’s mic preamps to mic the guitar amp and the drums. The guitar on this one was my Dean Evo FT. It’s a great guitar that you should still be able to get as a steal if you can find one – it has a coil-tap switch! The guitar sound is just the Evo through my Orange Crush 30r using the amp’s distortion and miked with a CAD E200.
The drums were recorded with just two mics, both small diaphragm condensers in an xy pattern about four feet out in front of the kit. The vocals were recorded as usual with just the iPhone’s built-in microphone, and I added a tinge of distortion and delay on the back end. The melodica was also recorded with the iPhone mic. Everything was recorded into the MultiTrack DAW app and then mixed and tweaked in Reaper.
Things are coming together pretty well for the Project 52 grand finale. I should be able to announce a show lineup pretty soon. The venue is set. It’s going to be at the Brillobox here in Pittsburgh on September 5th. I’ll be playing with a band version of Developer that features Chris James on bass (currently in Assembly & formerly of Life in Bed), and Geof Comings on drums (currently in Becoming Projections & formerly of Songs: Ohia). We’ll be playing a full set of Project 52 songs and then cap the show off with a live recording of the final song, which will be posted here the next day.
Week 45, Your Mind
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.
This was another rough week. I’ve had plenty of weeks where everything just fell into place, so I suppose that it’s fair to have one where it doesn’t. I may be overstating it. I don’t think that this is a bad song, but it’s a little sloppy, and I would love to have more time to work on it. The issues with this week were a result of having two Karl Hendricks Trio shows in four days, starting to spend more time and energy to get ready for the grand finale show, plus a kid who’s going through some rough sleeping spells.
With only a handful of minutes left in the week, I’m going to keep to the basics. All tracks were recorded with my Alesis ProTrack on the iPhone using the MultiTrack DAW app, except for the vocals, which were recorded with the iPhone’s built-in mic. The drums and the acoustic guitar tracks were recorded with the ProTrack’s built-in mics.
Thanks as always for stopping by. I’ll probably be sane again soon.
Week 44, Simple Alarm
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.
This was one of those weeks and songs that seemed to conspire against my meeting the deadline. With only eight songs left, there was no way that was I going to say “screw it”, but consequently some elements of the song, and all elements of my voice, suffered.
I was lucky enough to get one of those really awesome summer head-colds last week, right around the time that a heat wave blasted the Eastern US. On top of that foundation I added a hard-fought game of softball, the usual regimen of sleep deprivation, and a Karl Hendricks Trio show on Saturday night. I’m pretty sure that it was the really long show at a really smoky bar that did me in, because the next day, the day that the song was due, the song for which I hadn’t written lyrics and recorded vocals yet, on that day my voice was seriously shot. I soldiered on and tried to go through the process of restoring my voice as best as I could recall the techniques from my days singing in the high school touring choir over a long time ago. But to no avail. I couldn’t get anything other than a scratchy mess out of it and I was getting pretty frustrated. I put off the recording until the evening, and then finally just went through with my best effort to disguise my vocal incompetence by recording multiple takes in both octaves.
When I finally sat down to start mixing the song, and after a more liberal application of effects to the vocal mix, I found them to be surprisingly palatable, and with scratchier voice and sloppier guitar and drum performances than I would’ve liked, I made the deadline.
The recording is similar to the last few. The scratchy vocals were recorded with the iPhone mic as usual, and all of the instruments were recorded with the Alesis ProTrack, with the slight variation that the guitar amp was my Fender Twin instead of the Orange Crush for guitars. I broke out my trusty old Twin to begin the process of relearning some of the older songs for the first live performance of the Project 52 songs, which will be at the grand finale show, which I’ll be writing more about as soon as a few more of the details come together.
Week 43, Firefly
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.This week I broke full-on into the computer. I’ve been avoiding doing too much with computer-generated sounds for some reason or another. I think mostly because it hadn’t really been called for by the songs I’ve been writing, but also I’ve liked the idea that most of the songs have been live performances. In the case of this week’s song though, it just called for a simple beat and a little bit of horns. I can play a number of instruments, few of them really well, and I’ve made the most of the melodica over the year, but I don’t have any horns, and I can’t play them… at least not since I played the sax in 6th grade band.
Thanks to the great software Reason, I was able to drop in a nice tuba, a trombone, and a mellotron flute sound along with a touch of live melodica for good measure on top of a very simple beat, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out.
The acoustic guitar was recorded with the Alesis ProTrack using the built-in condenser mics, and the electric was recorded the same way as the last couple of weeks with the CAD E200 into the iPhone using the MultiTrack DAW app. The vocals were recorded with just the iPhone’s internal mic.
I only have nine songs left after this. I’m pretty excited about that, but I’m even more excited about the grand finale for the project. I’ll have more information about that in the coming weeks, but if you’re going to be in Pittsburgh over Labor Day weekend, leave your Sunday evening free and come out to help me celebrate.
Week 42, The Game
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.There have been a few times throughout this project that the song that I recorded doesn’t end up being the song that I thought it would be once it starts coming together. Usually I’ll run with it and make the most of it because I kind of have to due of the time constraint, and it usually works out all right. This week’s song was just too long, and it had a really awkward change in the end part. With a little creative splicing and editing in Reaper, I was able to drop a verse and completely make over the end of the song. I love how easy it is to seamlessly rearrange and augment a recording of live instruments. I’d love to be able to get every song just right every week, but it’s nice to have a back-up plan because I really don’t have the time to start over.
This is also one of those songs where I would really love to go back and re-record everything in higher fidelity. Not to knock the great sounds that I’ve been able to get out of my iPhone, but some songs lend themselves better to phone-fi than others.
With all of that said, this version of the song was recorded completely on the iPhone using the Alesis ProTrack with the MultiTrack DAW app. The drums were recorded with just the built in condenser mics on the ProTrack, and the guitar was recorded with the CAD E200. The vocals, which I’m dying to re-record, were done with the iPhone’s built-in mic. I spent a good bit of time applying EQ, mixing, and editing in Reaper.
Recording challenges aside, the song itself is solidly in the vein of bands like The New Year and Seam. I hope it doesn’t go as far as being derivative, but rather serves as a bit of homage, since these are a couple of my favorite bands. Seam hasn’t been around for years, but The New Year (formerly known as Bedhead with a different line-up) is still cranking out great records. Do yourself a favor and check them out.
Week 41, Garbage Out
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.Happy Father’s Day weekend everyone. Here’s to my pops, and here’s how I’m celebrating: I’m getting this post done early so that I don’t have to worry about it this weekend. I hope you’ll understand if I keep it to the basics.
To make things easy, this song was recorded identically to last week’s song – I wrote them together and recorded the drums together. For more detail on the recording process please reference the post for “Nothing Left”. Basically, “Garbage Out” was recorded on the iPhone using the Alesis ProTrack into the MultiTrack DAW app, and mixed using Reaper.
Eleven songs to go. This was a fun one; I hope you enjoy it.
Week 40, Nothing Left
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.Welcome to the home stretch. There are only twelve songs left.
This week’s song was again almost entirely recorded with the Alesis ProTrack, with the only exception being the vocals. I started out recording the vocals for this song with the Blue Mikey, but in the end I didn’t love how they sounded and went back and re-tracked them with the iPhone’s built-in mic. For whatever reason, I’ve found that the iPhone’s mic is usually just what I’m looking for. I EQ a little and drop in a bit of reverb and an occasional delay, and that’s what you hear on most of these songs.
The drums were recorded using the same idea as last week, but instead of using the built-in XY pattern mics on the ProTrack, I used a pair of condenser mics in the XY pattern out in front of the drum kit. I ran them into the preamps of the ProTrack and got decent results. I’ll keep playing around with it. For this song I kept two drum takes in, with one close to the center and one panned all the way to the right.
The acoustic guitar track was recorded with with the ProTrack’s built-in mics, and the rest of the guitars and bass were all performed through the Orange Crush 30r and recorded with my CAD E-200 condenser mic. Everything was recorded on my iPhone using the MultiTrack DAW app. The new version of MultiTrack is absolutely fantastic and poised to get even better. It’s really taken the leap to functioning like a true digital audio workstation while remaining intuitive and uncluttered. There isn’t another app out there that comes anywhere close to taking music making as seriously as this one does. It sounds like individual track EQ and effects are coming up next. I still have to pinch myself when I think that all of this is available for less than $20.
That’s about it for this week. Thanks as always for dropping by.
Week 39, Alas
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.This song marks the three-quarter point of Project 52, and it feels good. I can see the end.
This is also my first song using the Alesis ProTrack to record the drums as a single stereo track. It was the first try – basically placing it on a chair about five feet from the front of the drum kit and going with it. I think the drums came out sounding pretty good, all things considered. It exceeded my expectations, and I’ll be testing other ways of using the field recording mics as well as the dual mic inputs in the coming weeks. This is really the first time since week nine that I’ve recorded a full-0n rock song using the phone for everything.
The guitars and bass were recorded using my CAD E-200 to mic the Orange Crush 30r via a Presonus BlueTube preamp into the ProTrack. It was nice to change up the guitar recording just a little. I think they came out sounding pretty strong on this song. The vocals were recorded using the good old iPhone mic. Everything was recorded into the iPhone using the fabulous MultiTrack DAW app, which is now officially more fabulous as of yesterday, when the new version hit the streets (or app store as it were). I didn’t get a chance to upgrade yet, but check out the Harmonicdog Forums for info about the new version.
That’s about all that I have for now. It was a good week here in Pittsburgh. I hope you had a good week wherever you are as well. Oh, and if you are here in Pittsburgh or if you fancy a road trip, the Karl Hendricks Trio (in which I play bass) is playing a show on Friday night, June 11, at the 31st Street Pub. It’s the “The” bands showcase featuring The Karl Hendricks Trio, The Kyle Sowashes, Thee Shopkeepers, and The Sexy Accident.
Week 38, Rooftop Lives
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.The 38th song is a change-up. I hope you enjoy it. I’m writing from the wooded serenity of my in-laws’ house outside of Philadelphia. It’s Memorial Day weekend and that means an annual family trip down the PA Turnpike to my wife’s childhood home. The last time that I was here was week 13, for those of you keeping track. Unlike the 13th song, “These Days,” this song wasn’t recorded here and doesn’t feature my wife’s childhood Fisher Price xylophone or my father in-law’s amp. But it was mixed here; plus I mixed in a last minute but valuable addition to the song while I was out here.
The day before our trip, after getting off the bus, I was fooling around with my iPhone and listening to this song’s mix while I was walking down my street. For no good reason, I turned on the record-monitor button, which let me listen through the iPhone’s mic as I was walking. I was intrigued with how the everyday sounds of my street – birds, cars, people – mixed into the song, and I was just about a minute into recording some of it when the skies opened up and one of those summertime downpours came screaming out of nowhere. It was all that I could do to get my phone in my pocket before it got soaked (the outside of my pockets didn’t fair as well, along with the rest of me). I was frustrated by not getting a full track of street-sounds, but I pulled together a final mix for the song the night before the trip and resigned myself to shelve that little bit of ambiance for a future track. But as I fell asleep that night I came up with a plan for the morning: I made sure that I got myself all ready to go and set out to pack the car, my paternal duty, like a madman. This left just enough time for me to set up with the Alesis ProTrack and use the built-in field recording mics to track a few minutes of birds and cars and other street noises in stereo from my front porch. I remixed the track with a little more care, and now I’m feeling pretty good about how it turned out.
I’ve had the bass and guitar parts for this song finished for a couple of weeks, which was before my ProTrack arrived in the mail, so the guitars and bass were recorded onto the iPhone using the old break-out cable. This song was actually written on the bass and the guitar was added afterwords. This is the second song that I’ve ever written on bass. The first one was “Undefined”, from week 29. I think they both have a distinctly different flavor from the guitar-first songs. The drums on this one were recorded in the same fashion as the last number of songs, but I plan on auditioning the ProTrack next week. I’m going to spare you the redundant details of the drum recording as I’m trying not to take too much time-off from the family. As always, my faithful tools are the iPhone, the MultiTrack recording app, and Reaper, with honorable mention to my laptop for letting me take the show on the road.
Have a great holiday everyone, and I’ll see you next week for the completion of the third quarter of songs. In the mean time, enjoy three new additions to the free downloads page.
Week 37, Salty Stages
To listen on an iPhone, visit my Bandcamp site, or download the SoundCloud iPhone app.This week’s song is another in a line of pretty rocked-out tracks. I have to admit that I wasn’t feeling great about it at first. I wrote it half expecting to ditch it, but there were aspects of this simplistic song that I kinda was digging so I stuck with it. I know that I’ve probably written this for a number of songs by now, but once everything came together I really found myself liking this song, though I’m having a hard time characterizing it. I can’t seem to put my finger on what or who it sounds like. There’s definitely some Guided by Voices influence in there somewhere… if you’ve been following along you know that there’s a little of that in just about every song, but there’s also maybe a little Nirvana in the chorus, what with the harmonies and all. Yeah, I don’t really know.
As for the recording, it sits on the precipice of a new turn in my recording process, as it’s the first using a new tool that I’ve added to my arsenal. I’d been flirting with the idea of buying an Alesis ProTrack for about as long as I’ve been doing this project, but having read mixed reviews about its performance with the iPhone and generally being pretty happy with my process and wanting to avoid introducing any more distractions, I put off the inevitable purchase. The ProTrack, like the Blue Mikey, is a product that was developed for recording to an iPod, but works in some capacity with the iPhone. It’s basically a dock for the iPod/iPhone that has decent field-recording microphones built in as well as two XLR microphone inputs, with gain control for each (it even can provide phantom power to condenser mics). There are two features that I’ve been dying to have for a while – being able to record drums ad having better iPhone input options – and until my ProTrack arrived from Amazon, I wasn’t very sure that either would work well.
My first test was at a Karl Hendricks Trio practice. As anyone who’s seen the Trio live can attest to, we’re a pretty loud band, and I wanted to see if the ProTrack could handle being dropped into the middle of practice and pick up a stereo image of our space without clipping and distorting due to the high volume. On the first go, with little thought given to location, the ProTrack performed beautifully. It was no more than six feet away from any of the amps or drums, and it didn’t clip and actually sounded very accurate to what our practice sounds like. In my opinion, the ability to handle this kind of volume is what sets the ProTrack well above the Blue Mikey. I can’t say whether they improved the ability to record in high-volume situations for Mikey 2.0, but I can tell you for certain that version 1 is unusable for recording any sort of amplified live rock music onto an iPhone, with perhaps the exception of a relatively quiet band at an outdoor venue where the sound disperses more. As it relates to Project 52, I’ve always wanted a way to record drums quickly right onto the phone in similar fashion to how I’ve been recording guitars and vocals. Don’t get me wrong, I love the challenge of miking, recording, and mixing drums with a multi-mic setup, but that’s really been counter to one of my goals for this project – to let go and not fuss too much over performance, setup, mixing, etc. It’s really the only way that I’ve been able to make the deadline every week, and it’s been really freeing to have that regimen and not obsess too much about every last detail. The ProTrack may end up being the missing link for me to record drums right onto the phone. We’ll see. I haven’t had a chance to test out levels and placement to see if I can get anything that sounds good enough to use, but I’m optimistic.
The drums on this song and next week’s song were recorded before I got the ProTrack, so they’re still with the same five-mic setup of the last several weeks (reference week 29 for more info.) One fun little trick that I played with the drums is with the end part of the song – I kept a few different takes and decided to do something a little more interesting. As the song breaks down into the last section, I faded out of the main drum take while fading in two takes panned hard left and right. I staggered the fades so they come in and out at different times. I wanted to go back and mess with it a little, but it mostly came out how I wanted it to.
The guitars and vocals for this track were recorded using the ProTrack. I want to experiment more with using the ProTrack for vocals, though I’ve been pretty happy with using just the built in iPhone mic most of the time, and you can’t get much simpler than that. At first glance the mics sound pretty good and having the ability to run a condenser mic and/or a preamp into it gives me so much more flexibility. For the guitars, it was pretty much the same mic (Audio Technica ATM29HE), guitar (Fender Telecaster Thinline), and amp (Orange Crush 30r), but using the ProTrack instead of the mic adapter that I’d had made in week 2. The adapter has served me well for 35 weeks, but it came with some limitations (the metronome would bleed into the recording track from the headphone signal for instance.) I’ll be retiring the adapter for the time being. Thanks little buddy.
Meet the Widget
There’s one more item for this week: Fresh off of releasing Project 52, Volume 2 on my Bandcamp site (which you should definitely go listen to and download if you feel so inclined), I decided to finally go ahead and put out another digital release. Meet the Widget is an album that was recorded in 2005 and features the original band lineup of Developer. That’s me on guitars and vocals, Karl Hendricks on bass, and Jake Leger on the drums. It’s the same lineup as the Karl Hendricks Trio, just with Karl and me switching roles. I feel pretty good about this recording and the sound of the band at the time. We played a good number of shows at the time and recorded this with the same setup and pretty much at the same time as we recorded the Karl Hendricks Rock Band’s The World Says. After sitting on this for so many years, I decided to finally just go ahead and put it out now that there’s such a great site like Band Camp to facilitate the release. It took a little digging and file searching to conjure up the masters, song order, and the original cover art, but I managed to put it all together and get it out there. I hope you like it.
Have a great week everyone. I’ll see you soon.
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