Week 16, Over Time

Merry Christmas to those that celebrate and Happy New Year everyone! Youtube link for iPhone

I hope everyone has had a great holiday season. I’ve had a fantastic Christmas today with my amazing wife, who got me a Melodica, so expect to hear some serious Melodica-based tracks in the coming weeks. My kid had a blast and is completely overwhelmed by everything for better (sitting at his mini drum kit rocking out) and worse (total epic meltdown on Christmas eve at a Chinese restaurant with friends). 2009 has been an awesome year and this project has been a really great part of it. I didn’t see it coming. I’ve really enjoyed the challenge and connecting with people all over the world, and I can’t wait to see how things go down in 2010. I’m not sure if I’ll have a track done before the New Year or not, it depends on how things pan out next week.

One thing that’s coming up early next year is the digital release of Project 52,Volume 1. Everything is in place. I did a little mastering of the the first 13 tracks, uploaded the high quality mp3s, and now I’m just waiting for the album to go live. You’ll notice in the upper right-hand corner of the site that there’s a widget where you can listen to the remastered album, front to back, and eventually you’ll be able to pick up individual tracks or the entire album at iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon, and other stores online.

“Over Time” is another rock track that’s somewhat obviously influenced by Guided by Voices. At least that’s what I thought when I was writing it, but once it was done, I realized that there are also some serious shades of Nirvana. It makes sense because the other night I was completely sucked into a documentary about the making of the album Nevermind. I can’t help it. I was a grunge kid through and through. I still remember when my friend Todd came over to my house, frantically slapped a cassette into the tape deck, and started raving about this band he’d recorded off the local college radio station when someone had played the entire album over the air. It absolutely kicked my ass. It was unlike anything that we’d heard in our smallish town. That album was Bleach.

The song is pretty basic: guitar, bass, and drums. The guitars were recorded with MultiTrack on my iPhone using the custom break out cable. I also took two vocal tracks with the iPhone mic in Multitrack, but for the first time I wasn’t able to get the type of sound that I wanted for the vocals. I was prepared to make the most of them, but since I had extra time on Wednesday after finishing up the last two tracks for the video game my partner Dave and I have been working on, and getting a good drum take for the song, and since the Rode NTK was already set up, I re-recorded the vocals with the tube mic. I kept both recordings in for the last part of the song, so it wasn’t a complete loss. The bass track was through my Fender Twin and recorded with the Rode. As usual, the tracks were recorded and mixed in Reaper.

Tags: Cockos, Corey Layman, developer, Guided by Voices, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, Nevermind, Nirvana, Pittsburgh, Project 52, Verde Good Beans, Woolslayer and Main

Week 15, Clearing Up

Song number 15 is called Clearing UpYouTube link for iPhone

On Friday, I left the ground in Pittsburgh with every intention of carving out some time to write and record a song while I was visiting my sister in Denver so that all I would have to do is post it when I returned on Tuesday. I even went as far as copying my edition of Reaper onto a thumb drive to run on my sister’s laptop (yes, you can actually run the software right from your thumb drive!) When I got to my sister’s house and sat down at her piano, I knew that I wanted to take advantage of a rare opportunity to write and record something on it as I’m pretty sure that the only way I’d get a piano in my house is to build it in there. I had just enough time in between family fun to pound out a song, but as Tuesday morning rolled around, and we were only a couple hours away from taking off from Denver’s creepy airport, I had yet to record anything. So as my wife and my sister worked to get my kid ready for the trip, I nervously tried to get enough piano recorded to constitute a song. I admit to being out of shape  on the keys as it is, but in these circumstances my performance was doomed to be shaky at best. That said, I think the idea came through pretty well, and when I finally got a chance to put everything together, the song came out rather nice.

The sound of this one is reminiscent of one of my favorite bands, Idaho. Idaho started out as a rock band on Caroline Records in the early 90’s, fronted by Jeff Martin. For a quick introduction into his music, take a look at this video of Jeff performing the song “To Be the One” from the Idaho Web site.

“Clearing Up” is a simple song, so I kept the recording simple. I used the Blue Mikey with my iPhone sitting on top of the piano – there was little time to mess around with placement. I doubled the piano track and EQed the low-end out on the first track and left just the low frequencies on the second. I’ve been experimenting with this technique since getting a tip from Joe, the patriarch of my favorite lunchtime and coffee haunt, Verde Good Beans in downtown Pittsburgh. You can hear the effect in this song a bit as I played around with some fading between the tracks at the beginning and end of the song – it starts out bright and then slowly rounds out into bassy piano as the song fades out. The guitar sounds consist of a few acoustic takes of two-note variations within the songs chords, and then I added a couple of delays to bring out that ambient slow feedback sound.

I recorded the vocals with the good old iPhone mic and as usual, I recorded everything into the MultiTrack app and mixed it all up in Reaper. I just got the word that Multitrack version 1.1 was submitted to Apple for approval. It looks to be a big step up from an already solid recording app, and I’ll make quick use of the built-in metronome and the support for stereo recording. It will be interesting to see how the Mikey sounds in stereo.

Thanks everyone for being patient as my releases have been pushed later into the week. I should have more free time in the coming weeks, so I’ll try to work my way back to Monday releases. Good news on the publishing front: cover art for Volume 1 is complete, and I’ve made the arrangements to have digital downloads for sale on iTunes and other stores in a number of weeks. I’d like to go back and master all of the songs together, get them out there for sale, and then I’ll get to work on the prospects for physical release (hopefully on vinyl).

Tags: Cockos, Corey Layman, developer, Harmonicdog, hovland, Idaho, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Jeff Martin, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, Pittsburgh, slowcore, Verde Good Beans, Woolslayer and Main