Tracks!

[mdlbear]

Didn't do much today, but I did put down two takes. One of High Barratry that wasn't enough of an improvement to keep, and one of Demon Lover [ogg] that's (finally!) almost passable as a demo. (These two are convenient to do together because they're both capo 2, so I don't have to re-tune.) (Aside to cflute -- let me know if you want a version with your part missing. Or would you like the whole 138MB Audacity project to play with?) In any case, I won't vouch for my pitch accuracy of the high voice on the last verse, and there's a word wrong in the low voice (worlds souls).

I learned a lot about editing:

For one thing, I learned that there's enough bleed-through from the vocals to the guitar track that it's basically impossible to suppress a cough or a false start -- that's what killed "Barratry". I successfully deleted the two verses I had to do over, but the one where I had a false start... no way -- it's still there on the guitar track. OK, next time I'll remember to just back up and do the whole verse. (I also learned that deleting a bungled verse is pretty easy, and not as quite as touchy on the timing as I thought it would be.)

So for "Demon", which is a duet, there are really only two choices: record a totally clean solo guitar track and try to put down the vocals cleanly on top of it (hard -- I tried that once and failed miserably), or record a reasonably clean guide track and add all three parts separately. At least that's symmetrical.

Well, I guess there's another possibility, which would be to record the whole thing live. I think I'll pass on that one for now. Though I will attempt it at Consonance.

Comments

[callibr8]

let me know if you want a version with your part missing. Or would you like the whole 138MB Audacity project to play with?)

Actually, both might be useful. We just need to find someplace to put files that large. If you've got a place to put 'em, I can dl them and put them on my thumb drive and take 'em home and work with 'em, which would be great. :)

[mdlbear]

I'd use my home system except that it would take about 9 hours to transfer over my miserable upstream bandwidth. So it's probably a matter of sneakernetting it to work and transferring it to my ISP from there. (Or borrowing some server space at work, only I'm pretty sure my ISP is better-connected.)

[callibr8]

That would work... and so would burning the files to a CD and dropping the media in the snail-mail. Whatever works for you with minimum hassle, will be fine by me.

[mdlbear]

OK, here's the quick version of option 1: this file has my part and the guitar in the left track, and your part in the right track. I'll see what I can do with the Audacity project tomorrow.

[mdlbear]

... and here's the other shoe -- the file demon.tar.gz is the gzip'ped tar file, or you could suck down take-4.aup and the contents of the take-4_data/ directory (total about twice as big). I'm pretty sure winzip handles tar files these days.

The .tar.gz file took about 15 minutes to transfer over our T1 line.

[callibr8]

record a reasonably clean guide track and add all three parts separately

That would be my suggestion, yes. It has worked for us on various occasions.

[mdlbear]

I'll try that, then.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

I have been told by an audio engineer friend of mine that in order to get a clean guitar recording, clamp a pair of isolation headphones to the guitar, and connect them to the input source. (This has the added advantage of actually giving you a stereo split that you can use, if you want to modify the imaging at all.

On "Demon Lover", if you're going to have multiple instruments, I think it would be nice to have them be separated a bit -- guitar, with the male voice, on [mostly] one side, and flute, with the female voice, mostly on the other... with the goal being to create a "wall between" effect. (If you do this, you could even slightly distort the sound on the other side of the gap -- but not too much or it would be unlistenable.)

Just a thought. I'm working on my own stuff right now, and my biggest problem at the current moment is finding a good microphone that doesn't destroy my voice when I record with it. (The second-largest problem is finding the d%$ned MIDI cable.)

[mdlbear]

The first thing I tried was male voice on one side, female on the other, and the guitar in the middle; increasing the voice separation will work better when there are more instruments in the mix.

Definitely some kind of processing needed on the "other side", possibly just some reverb -- enough to be noticable.

As for the mics, you could try going into a music store and auditioning a dozen or so. It depends a lot on your budget, of course. I'm not sure about that headphone-on-guitar trick -- it would probably work, but it's not clear how it would sound.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

I've been told that with a high quality set of isolation headphones, it picks up the sound quite beautifully. And, in fact, that's usually how they do it in the studio, as it guarantees a guitar-only track, without picking up any extraneous noise.

[mdlbear]

Where do they attach them? Front and back of the body?

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Front and back of the body, generally under the forearm (so they don't get in the guitarist's way) -- whereever convenient for how the guitar is held.