Blue Mikey
Week 24, Simple to Center
I’m sorry folks, but sometimes pop happens… and it happened a bunch on this song.
Simple to Center was written and recorded (except for the drums) in one sitting on Valentine’s Day. All of the tracks – acoustic and electric guitar, bass, vocals, and a little shaker – were recorded with the Blue Mikey. I tried to finish the song off on V-day by recording a drum take with the Mikey, but it was a total fail. The Mikey (version 1) is just not a good tool for recording drums into the iPhone. It can’t handle the high volume and clips well beyond the effect of a little distortion. This is also a problem when attempting to record a live band with the Mikey, which is something it’s supposed to be able to do. This is a known issue by Blue, and the original Mikey was developed for the iPod and not the iPhone, so they never claimed to fully support it.
Blue just came out with a new version of the Mikey, which was developed with full iPhone support. I think my Mikey is a great tool, but before shelling out another $80 on version 2, I wanted confirmation that the clipping issue was addressed and resolved. I emailed Blue’s support to find out, and even copied some of their other departments to give them a heads up about my site since I’ve been pimping their product. Alas, no one got back to me. That’s too bad because I’d love to be writing today with a definitive answer about the drums, and my hunch is that if they didn’t answer then maybe the problem isn’t fixed. That’s really too bad because otherwise the Mikey is a great sounding mic (as you can hear), and it’s even better now using version 1.1 of MultiTrack which allows for use of the Mikey’s dual condensers in stereo.
This cheesy little pop song is for my wife Jenn. I wouldn’t have made it past week 1 without her patience, understanding, and support. I really appreciate it.
Week 11, Minimum Style
The eleventh song is called Minimum Style. YouTube link for iPhone
This song was written while fooling around with my two-year-old’s toy guitar, pictured below. Also in the picture is my Orange Crush 30R, which I’ve used for just about all of the guitar and bass tracks so far.
my kid's toy guitar
I recorded the toy guitar part while sitting in on my bathroom floor and using the Blue Mikey. The tile in the bathroom made for a nice punchy reverb to couple with the guitar. It’s my first time recording in the bathroom and that was done because my kid was playing downstairs and if he had heard me playing the guitar he probably would’ve wanted to go upstairs and play the drums.
Sometimes I get a pretty small window of opportunity to get a take down and I can’t be picky. I think that was particularly true with this song knowing that I was working with a short week. Looking ahead at the calendar I have the holidays, traveling to Colorado, coming up on a deadline for a video game soundtrack (more on this another week), and a very important University of Pittsburgh football game in a couple of weeks. So I expect that I’ll need to keep things simple for the next couple of songs. Of course when I set out to keep things simple I end up using seven guitar tracks. Go figure.
Anyway, back to the song. So there’s toy guitar throughout, then the rest of the guitar tracks were recorded on my baritone guitar. One take is clean, more bass-like, and plays through most of the song after the intro. The other two are dirty, more guitar-like tracks, and just play through the last bit of the song where it opens up. I love the baritone and wish I could use it more often. Well, good thing I have 31 songs left to write. The baritone was recorded using the custom break-out cable through the Orange as usual. I added vocals using the Blue Mikey (I think – it’s been a while now and everything is running together). Oh yeah, and I felt compelled to add whistling in the beginning for some reason, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and I think that it came out fine, but every time I hear the beginning of the song now I can’t help but think that I’m listening to Guns and Roses’ “Patience”…not that there’s anything wrong with that. And I suppose hearkening back to G n’ R isn’t an unprecedented move for me – there are probably a few people out there who can recall that my old band Hovland would evey once in a while drop a cover of “Mr. Brownstone”.
Tim Midgett of Bottomless Pit
Andy Cohen of Bottomless Pit
I added drums with the usual four mic setup the day before the tour while I had my studio setup to work on the video game. The drums were recorded in Reaper and everything else was recorded using the iPhone into MultiTrack.
Everything ended up working out pretty well. My friend Chris said that this song could have been a bit longer, and since he mentioned it I think he’s probably right. But I managed to pull the song together before heading out on tour with The Karl Hendricks Trio, and that has to count for something. We had a great time, played some good shows in Columbus and Bloomington with The Kyle Sowashes, and then capped off the tour with a killer show in Chicago opening for Bottomless Pit. It was a great crowd, all the bands really nailed their sets, and I got to see a bunch of old Pittsburgh friends who have moved out to Chicago over the years.
Here are a couple of dark photos (thanks flashless iPhone) of Bottomless Pit from the show at the Hideout in Chicago. These guys are seriously one of the best-sounding bands that I’ve ever heard live, and on a recording for that matter. I’m truly honored to share a stage with them. You should all be making plans to pick up their two records on your next vinyl shopping trip.
Thanks again to Kyle and the rest of the Sowashes for setting up the tour and for good company along the way. Thanks to everyone for coming out, and thanks to everyone here for continuing to listen.
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.
Week 9, Solace
The ninth song is called Solace. YouTube link for iPhone
Officially the longest song so far – it also has the fewest lyrics coming in at three lines.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Seam lately, and though this song probably sounds a little bit more like a Bedhead or The New Year song, I would attribute it to my recent Seam obsession. If you’re not already a fan of Seam, Bedhead, or The New Year, then I would recommend checking them out. Seam and Bedhead have been defunct for a good while, but The New Year is still alive, well, and cutting records.
Speaking of Seam, I have a couple degrees of separation from Seam’s last drummer, Chris Manfrin. Chris is my wife’s second cousin, and happens to be the current drummer in Bottomless Pit. Bottomless Pit is the completely amazing band of former Silkworm frontmen Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett. Chris and I have crossed paths as Bottomless Pit and the Karl Hedricks Trio have played several shows together here in Pittsburgh and on the road. The reason I bring it up is because the Trio will be playing a show with Bottomless Pit in Chicago in a couple of weeks at the Hideout on November 14. We’ll also be playing in Bloomington, IN on the 13th, Columbus, OH on the 12th, and right here in Pittsburgh this Thursday. The Kyle Sowashes, another fantastic band, are kind enough to play all of these shows with us (and book them, thanks Kyle). I hope to catch up with some of my Pittsburgh friends at Howler’s for this week’s show, and would love to see anyone else who is in reasonable proximity to the other shows.
Enough about that stuff, here’s the deal with the song:
It gets pretty huge-sounding thanks to seven guitar tracks. The vocal tracks and the three main guitar tracks were recorded into the iPhone using the Blue Mikey. I really wanted to capture the clean tone of my Fender Twin – you can hear that the Mikey captured the Twin + Telecaster sound pretty well as illustrated in the first section of the song. I added a couple more guitar tracks using my Rode NTK tube condenser straight into the laptop since I already had everything set up to record the drums. The next day I added a couple more guitar tracks and the bass track using the custom break-out cable (from Week 2) to mic my Orange practice amp. I wanted a nice full drum sound for this song, so I went back to the four mic arrangement from weeks 4 through 7 but with the Rode NTK out in front of the drum set. I like how they ended up sounding, and for once I’m not miserable about my performance (I don’t fancy myself a drummer). I also managed to work in another DopplerPad track. I created a 16-beat loop which I wanted to sit lightly in the mix and then imported it into Reaper. The loop plays throughout the song, but you can only really hear it during the first and last sections. DopplerPad is really a great iPhone app. I’m looking forward to what they have planned for the next update. I used the fantastic MultiTrack iPhone app again to record everything with the exception of the drums and a couple guitar tracks.
Anyway, that’s about it for this week. Don’t forget to come out and see Bottomless Pit, The Kyle Sowashes, and The Karl Hendricks Trio on our tiny whirlwind tour (which is about the right size for us dudes with kids).
Week 7, For No One
This week’s song is called For No One. YouTube link for iPhone
I wanted to save myself from exhaustion and tried to get back to the low-fi concept that I started with. Well, with 14 tracks recorded I only partially achieved that goal.
Here’s how it breaks down:
I started out with two acoustic guitar tracks panned wide that I recorded using the Blue Mikey. There are two electric guitar tracks – both were recorded using the custom break-out cable to mic my Orange practice amp. I added three silly rhythm tracks with the Mikey and whatever I could find laying around. Those are pretty low in the mix now, but if you listen for them you can pick them up.
Next I took a shot at recording drums using the Mikey. I’d read that people were having mixed results using it for high-volume live music, but I’m not the loudest drummer in the world and I figured I’d give it a go and see how it turned out. It worked well enough for what was supposed to be a low-fi song. I’m happy to know that it works because it saves me precious time. I actually have two mostly identical drum takes running on this song for no good reason. They’re panned just a little bit and you can pick out the different tracks as everything falls apart at the end. I’ll keep messing around with drums through the Mikey and see if I can’t find a way to get a great drum sound using the iPhone. I’d be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on how this one came out.
Finally, I added four vocal tracks using just the iPhone mic. The bass track was the usual setup – micing my practice amp with a dynamic mic through the break-out cable. Mixing and production was done using Reaper.
The song itself was written in good old drop-D tuning. It looks like maybe next week will mark my first song using standard tuning. I’m really not that much of a tuning geek, but for some reason it took me two months to get back to basics.
For the second week I recorded everything into MultiTrack, the 16-track iPhone app by Harmonicdog that is really great and is only going to get better. I managed to pull this one off without a metronome, which is promised to be forthcoming, but that’s not something I’ll be able to get away with too often.
Anyway, not a whole lot more to say about this one. Keep the comments coming. One from Chris last week was inquiring about a way to play the songs on your iPhone. I’ve been looking, but since phones are unable to use flash players, it really limits my options other than making the songs available as downloads. I’m not ready yet to post the songs up for download because I haven’t decided for sure what I want to do with the entire project when it’s all said and done. At minimum, I will look into having the mp3’s available for purchase, and maybe have a free mp3 of the month feature or something like that – I could even put up some stuff from my old bands and projects over the years…well thankfully I still have 45 weeks left to figure this all out. I would really like to release the entire collection in three or four volumes on a hard format as well. I have a lot of planning to do and would be happy to hear your thoughts on all of this stuff. Oh, and if anyone knows of a player out there that I could embed or use through WordPress that would work for the iPhone, let me know.
Week 6, Pushing It
The sixth song is called Pushing It. YouTube link for iPhone
I’m finding out that these songs have lives of their own. Last week I set out to write a short acoustic song. I wanted to experiment with the Blue Mikey, and since we had my mom and step-dad coming in from New Mexico on Thursday, I knew that I only had a little time to work with. So what started out as a short and simple acoustic song, ended up as not so much, but it worked out all right. The production was definitely rushed, and I would have been happy to have retaken some of the guitar tracks, and don’t get me started on the drums… but then that’s the deal with this project. I like how the song came out, and it worked out as a nice chance to use DopplerPad in one of my songs. DopplerPad is another great iPhone app, developed by Retronyms, co-developer of FourTrack. Here’s a video of DopplerPad in action. It’s super-fun, but could easily eat up all of your free time.
Anyway, here’s how the song breaks down: The tuning is D-A-D-G-B-D. There’s one vocal track and three acoustic guitar tracks recorded with the Blue Mikey, one acoustic track of the entire song and the other two are just during the break, hard panned. I wanted the break to sound huge. I added two electric guitar tracks of the same take – after getting a drum take that I could live with, I tracked the electric part on my Fender Twin using the overhead mic and the Rode NTK further back in the room. I added a bass track using the custom break-out cable on my practice amp, and the drums were the same four-mic setup from the last two weeks. I recorded the drums and the electric guitar tracks using Reaper onto my laptop. I recorded the rest of the tracks onto the iPhone using a new app, MultiTrack. MultiTrack is a fantastic piece of iPhone software developed by Harmonicdog. Believe it or not, it’s a fully functioning 16-track with input gain and input monitoring, two features that no one else that I’ve seen has pulled off well or even at all. It was just released in September and is relatively bare-bones, but due to having complete access to the developer on Harmonicdog’s forum, I can tell you that there are many more great features on the way (including a metronome, which is the one thing keeping me from using this app more often).
When everything else was done I added two tracks of DopplerPad which creep into the mix gradually. I used a 1/8″ cable plugged directly between the iPhone headphone jack and the mic input jack on my laptop and used the iPhone and DopplerPad like an instrument. It ended up having just about the effect that I was looking for. I don’t know how much I will end up using DopplerPad again on this project, if at all. But it’s super-fun to play with, so I’ll get my money’s worth.
One last thing. You may have noticed a new addition to the website. I’ve added a subscribe feature on the main page so that, if you’d like, you can get a heads up of when I post my weekly song. You can use RSS, Twitter, or simply have an email sent. Thanks again to everyone for listening. Have a great week.
Week 5, Back Out
The fifth song is called Back Out.YouTube link for iPhone
I’m pretty pleased with how this one came together. This song, like last week’s, was written in the drop-high-D tuning. It’s a really simple song. One guitar part, recorded once with my Audix dynamic mic through the custom iPhone adapter (same method for the bass track), and once with a new addition to my iPhone arsenal, the Blue Mikey.
Mikey was developed by Blue, a high-quality mic company, for recording to the iPod. It’s not officially compatible with the iPhone, but it’s worked just fine for me and some of the other folks out there working on iPhone recording. Mikey plugs into the iPhone connector, rather than the headphone jack, where it gets the power to make two tiny condenser mics work. All of the vocal tracks and the second guitar take on Back Out were recorded using the Mikey.
I’m happy with how everything ended up sounding, but it’s really a sensitive/touchy mic and I’m thinking there’s a bit of a learning curve on how to get the most out of it without too much noise. There are three gain settings, with the lowest advertised to handle loud live music. I’ve read that some have had mixed results using Mikey for that application, but it’s a relatively new product and there’s not a whole lot of user feedback that I’ve been able to find yet. For what it’s worth, I took a minute to test it out across the room from my drum kit and it seemed to be able to handle it without noticeable clipping. With 47 songs left there will be ample time to give Mikey a good workout.
For the drums I used the same four-mic setup as last week’s song with a slight shift of the snare mic. Drums and mixdown were in Reaper as usual. The other tracks were recorded on the iPhone using FourTrack. Extra thanks to the great folks at Sonoma Wire Works, the developer of FourTrack and other great iPhone and non-iPhone audio software. They were nice enough to mention me on their website and Facebook page. I really appreciate it. I’m digging how the iPhone has become the fertile ground for all of these creative new apps. It’s been really cool to be able to have access to the software developers and see how quickly things are evolving.
As always, I welcome your comments and questions. When I have a little more time I’d like to expand the links portion of this site, so if you have a favorite music or recording blog, site, magazine, or whatever, let me know.
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- project52: I was trying to protect your pr-eye-vacy! My wife, everyone. She’s right. though. It’s only...
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