Week 41, Garbage Out

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.

Tags: Alesis, bandcamp, Cockos, Corey Layman, DAW, developer, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, phone-fi, Pittsburgh, podcast, Project 52, ProTrack, Woolslayer and Main

Week 40, Nothing Left

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.

Tags: Alesis, bandcamp, Cockos, Corey Layman, DAW, developer, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, phone-fi, Pittsburgh, podcast, Project 52, ProTrack, Woolslayer and Main