Just Keeps Rolling Along

Production

Got guitar tracks for one and a half songs tonight, sent those off to collect vocals, and prepared another song to receive guitars.  I need to start pulling in some of my other musicians now for some icing on these cakes.

I’m pretty sure my college friends suddenly don’t have a lot going on this weekend.

Also, my sync issue with Audition seems to have been fixed!  I was able to pull in all the new sounds without a problem.  Hooray for James and his 6am forays into the inner regions of Audition settings!

Mulligan!

Production, ,

Drum tracks have been recorded for 5 of the songs so far, and I’ve recorded bass for each of them.  Usually, I’m able to gauge how well the song will turn out by this point by how it feels during the bass recording process.  When Kevin is tracking, I usually play along silently to get a feel for the performance also.  Since I’m not very good at guitar, I generally use that as my standard – if I can play the song on guitar at the tempo and feel Kevin is playing, then that’s a good start.  I’ve been playing along with bass though, so I’m able to play comfortably at faster tempos, and that has led to a couple of takes that are faster than they should be.  A lot of the other parts don’t work as well at different tempos, so it’s a balancing act between playing what feels best when it’s just bass and drums, and keeping in mind all the other stuff that’s going to get heaped on top.

Kevin isn’t playing to a click track, which is a something I’ve normally done when recording this way.  The demos for the songs with real drums were all played to a click track.  Usually, it’s an annoyingly loud click in one stereo channel, and a rough bass and/or guitar in the other – then you can listen through headphones while you’re playing to follow along.  Kevin chooses not to work this way, and that’s fine, but it places extra responsibility on me to make sure he isn’t getting carried away.  He’s perfectly capable of playing every one of these songs at ridiculous tempos, and they would sound fine until the other parts started getting layered in.

Long story short…we re-recorded one of the songs last night.  I think it’ll work out a lot better now.

We also started working on a couple of the remaining songs.  I’ve saved the harder songs for last, and I question that judgement from time to time, but then I look at the 5 songs we’ve now finished drums for, and the one that is almost complete, and wonder if I’d have that much done if one of these other songs were first. Probably not.  We’re coming down the home stretch for drums though, and that’s very exciting.

Kevin and I have a bit to keep us busy once he’s done with his part on this album, so we press on.

Crisis Averted?

Production

As I mentioned previously, I started having issues with tracks not lining up properly when I received them from other folks.  This morning, I was listening to the vocal mix with James before work, and he noticed that my status bar in Adobe Audition showed “16-bit mixing.”  He said that the default is 32-bit for “premixing” and that may be the problem – everyone else is rendering their tracks in 32-bit, and mine are 16.  Apparently, he’s had issues with this in the past, and he’s had to take some rather drastic steps to fix it (ie, reinstall his operating system).  I vaguely remember changing some settings – particularly to specify that I wanted to record in mono by default.  Sure enough, the option for premixing was set to 16 bit.  I changed it, restarted Audition, created a new session, imported all the audio – including the original guitar tracks that hadn’t lined up previously, and everything was exactly the same – wrong.  I’ve already edited the guitar tracks so they line up, so that’s no biggie.

I’m going to re-render my reference mixes for Grant though, since he’s only finished one song.  If he’s done another in the meantime, I know what I need to do to edit the file to get them to fit – it’s just sticking an extra tenth of a second (give or take a millisecond) at the beginning of  the file.  I delete that much, and it lines up fine.

The rough part is lining up the many, many vocal tracks for this first song.  James is really good at harmonizing, and I’ve told him I want him to go crazy with it.  He has, and it’s great.

Hopefully, this won’t be an issue again.

It can't all be good

Production, ,

I knew everything was going too smoothly.

I’ve started getting tracks from my other conspirators, and I’m running into some odd technical issues.  Mainly, tracks aren’t lining up when I put them all together in the same session.  To make matters more confounding, one of the reference tracks I recorded became out of sync when I rendered it down to a stereo track.  Grant tried to play along with it, and the bass was a full beat ahead of the drums!  I checked my original session, and it was fine, so I have no idea what happened.  I re-rendered the reference track and sent that to Grant, so hopefully that hurdle is overcome.

I also got my first vocal tracks today from my friend, James, and I’m over the moon ecstatic about this.  He noticed a problem with the sync in his reference too – on a different song that Grant had issues with.  He noticed about a 1/10th of a second discrepancy, and I noted this too when I tried to add Grant’s guitar for that song into my session.  I was able to cut a bit of silence from the beginning of Grant’s tracks to make them line up, and everything was fine, so I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but since James has mentioned it as an issue he’s had, I’m more than a little concerned about this.

Right now, though, I’m not letting this get in the way of being happy about what’s essentially my first completed song for the album.  This kind of came out of nowhere, because I didn’t expect to get any vocals until I was able to return most of the stuff I’d borrowed from James.

We’ve played together for years now, and written a bunch of music together.  I don’t know if there’s anyone I trust more with my music than James.  There have been so many times that I’ve written something and he’s taken my caterpillar of an idea and handed me back a butterfly.  A lot of these songs came about this way – I’d write some music, and he’d come back with some amazing lyrics and vocals.  He also played drums and guitar on a lot of the demos for these songs, so there was no way I couldn’t include him in this.  Actually, he’s pretty much the one responsible for planting the seed that grew into this.  He’s the one who came up with “Yes, Mayhem” which I love, and he was the one who suggested I try a solo album.  When I say “solo” I mean that facetiously because this is a collaborative effort, and there’s no one more involved in this than he is and has been.

Funny story about how spoiled I am by the consistent quailty of James’ contributions to this thing I do:  Once, I tried out for a band and put together some songs as a resume for the guy in charge.  There were maybe 6 or 8 songs on there showcasing my versatility as a bassist, because I wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for.  He called me freaking out and said that he wanted to scrap the album he was working on and have me write a whole new one from scratch with him!  He also wanted to use a few of the songs on my demo tape.  That was more than I bargained for, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.  He said he’d overdub some stuff (lead guitar and vocals) over one of the songs and get it back to me to see what I thought.

I hated it.

The guy is a great player and a really nice guy, and what he’d done was certainly competent, but it just wasn’t a good fit at all, stylistically.  In fact, it was pretty much the exact opposite of my aesthetic.  I felt like someone had shot my dog.  James was living in Indiana at the time, but I called him in a panic and played the song for him over the phone.  He agreed with me.  I ended up cutting ties with the guy, hopefully amicably, because I knew it wasn’t a good musical fit.  James ended up recording his own version of the song in question, and I loved it, and love it now.

What I’ve gotten out of James so far hasn’t let me down, and I can’t wait to hear what’s next.  I just need to figure out these technical issues.

Class is in session

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It looks like I’ve got a few good drum tracks now.  We’ve not finished tracking drums – in fact, we’re a little less than halfway finished, but I’m at a point where I can start adding in more instruments.

Bass is the next step in the process.  I haven’t really thought much about the bass because it’s kind of second nature to me at this point.  I’ve had to adjust some things slightly to key off things Kevin is playing, but for the most part, I’ve been able to record bass tracks in a single take.  In the couple of cases where I haven’t just sat down and played the bass parts, I cheat for the sake of speed.  I’ll record two tracks of bass and alternate between the two.  I’ll play the verses on one track, then the choruses on the other.  They edit together seamlessly, and its way faster to do it that way when you need to re-record parts.  I don’t like doing major editing to the tracks to accomodate a punch in, so this way works pretty well.  I’ve only done it on two songs so far, because I kept messing up one part, and I didn’t feel like redoing the entire track.

Now, it’s time for guitars.  My primary rhythm guitarist is a fellow by the name of Grant Henry.  There’s a very good chance that anyone reading this already knows who he is, and has wound up here by way of his Metroid Metal project.  I’ve managed a small amount of internet fame as a direct result of riding his coattails as the bass player on many of those songs, and I also get to play in his full live band for MM.  Anyone who has heard his solo stuff as Stemage knows that he doesn’t actually *need* me, so I feel fortunate to be included.  Grant and I have known or at least known of each other for over a decade now, as we were both part of the same music scene.  We’ve done quite a bit of over-the-internet collaboration, and he’s asked me to send him stuff to play on, so he was way high on the list when I was putting together this project.  He’s a fantastic musician, and one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet.  That’s lucky for me, because I’m hanging a lot of the weight of this album on him.

He’s always given me a lot of leeway in what I can do with the tracks he’s asked me to play on, so I’m giving him the same freedom – but, I also want him to work in my original guitar ideas since many of these songs started as a guitar part, and I want to preserve the kernal that sparked the whole thing.  I can’t wait to see what he’s able to do, because I’ve had to deal with listening to my guitar playing on these songs for years.  So, to get him up to speed on what I’m doing and how I’m doing it, I’ve made some instructional videos for him.  When we were learning the parts for Metroid Metal Live, he made videos for me as well as the other guitarists.   These were incredibly helpful, so I’m returning the favor.  I’ll upload the videos to YouTube and he can refer to them at his leisure.  Sorry, but they’re shared privately at the moment.  Maybe they’ll be included on the “making of” DVD*.

I’m thinking of calling the album “Holy Crap, I Love the Internet.”

*no, I’m not actually making a DVD

Stream of (un)consciousness

Production

I want to write a bit about working titles.  All of my songs have working titles, because I have to name the directories on my computer *something* to keep them organized.  This is a list of the working titles for each of the songs I’ve selected for this album:

  • brutal
  • 32305
  • brainscrape
  • neater gunn
  • take2
  • concrete flea
  • 0926-2
  • reliable
  • 1005
  • tesselating
  • victim

This list is subject to change.  Specifically, this list is subject to be increased.  So far, this process is going well, and I’m encouraged by that to add more songs.  Also, I’d like the total running time of the album to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 minutes, and with the tightening I’m doing with some of the song structures combined with a tendency to play these a little faster than the original demos, the songs are ending up shorter than I’d originally thought.  I am not upset by this.

Now, it may be clear that my naming convention is, well, nonexistent.  Some of the titles are pretty unimaginitive (“brutal” “take2”), some refer to the date they were written (“1005”, “0926-2” (I had two separate ideas that day), “032305”), but some are personal inside jokes that are apropos of nothing.

“Reliable” is so named because before it was a full blown song, the bass solo in the middle is something I’d always tend to default to when just playing around – it was my ‘old reliable’ lick I’d come back to when I couldn’t think of anything else to play.

“Concrete Flea” got named when I visited my parents during the time I was recording the demo.  Their dog had a special place he would lie outside by the sidewalk.  He got fleas, and the concrete was covered with them, and they got on me, and so that was on my mind.

“Victim” was named because I was prevented from recording that demo because someone kept calling me asking me to fix their computer, and ‘victim’ is how I felt.

Now that I think about it, maybe “inside joke” isn’t the right term, because none of those things are very funny.  “Inside boring story” is probably better.  The other songs are named for equally pointless and boring reasons.  The only reason I even mention all this is because people ask me a lot what the names mean.  My music is instrumental, so there aren’t any lyrics to explain anything, and the names are all mysterious.  Well, now you know – they don’t mean anything.

That said, when a song of mine gets lyrics (from an outside 3rd party – usually by my friend, James), it also gets a real name, like Pinocchio.  I guess that makes James the Blue Fairy, but I digress.  “Brutal” is now called “Release,” “brainscrape” is now called “Sunday Best,” and “neater gunn” is now called “Neatomatter.”  “0926-2” is now called “926” because due to an amazing coincidence, it’s also our work hours (nine to six), and he wrote about how much he doesn’t like working, a theme common in his lyrics.

When/if other songs get lyrics, their names will then be derived from those, and the working titles will be left behind like little appendixes – vestigial and useless.  That’s the main reason why I don’t spend a whole lot of time on working titles.

Reality Checks

Production, ,

That SM57 and the ensuing microphone shuffling seems to have made a world of difference.  Using the SCM800s as overheads has given a lot more body to the drums – especially the toms, and *not* using a condenser on the snare gave me a lot more headroom in getting a good signal to tape.  I imagine that anyone who actually knows what they’re doing in this regard may read this and say, “well yeah, duh” but this is me stumbling in the dark, arms outstretched, wrecking my shins on the coffee table.

Every Thursday night for the past 3 weeks, Kevin and I have been recording, and I’ve rushed home to dump the drum tracks onto my computer so I can mix them together and marvel at my own prowess (ok, actually Kevin’s ability).  I’ve got a pair of E-MU PM5 monitor speakers that I love (when they’re working), and I can make mixes sound pretty good and they generally translate well to other sources.  I noticed immediately that the drums sounded way better than the previous recordings, so I feel pretty good about my purchase.  I did a couple of quick drum mixes using my presets, and was pleased with the results.  I also put down a couple of rough bass tracks and made quick mixes of those.  You can check those out here:

Reliable rough drums and bass

Concrete Flea rough drums and bass

I listened to these at work this morning, and I was very disappointed.  The sound on my monitors at home was full and beefy, but it’s tinny and weak here.  The speakers I have on my computer at work are nowhere near the quality of my studio monitors, but still, there shouldn’t be this much of a discrepancy.  I’m prone to having overpowering low end in my productions (give me a break, I’m a bassist!), so I think I may have erred on the side of too little low end.

I’ve done a LOT of tweaking with the sound, and I’ve tried to think ahead about where other instruments I’m planning should fit in the mix, and I’ve adjusted my drum mixes accordingly.  I realized that I should probably just stick with the rough drums straight out of the recorder, and wait until I get all the other instruments together to start carving out sonic space for everything.  That point was driven home to me this morning, when my friend James suggested that my tweaks were “way too complicated.”  Yes, he’s right, I’m spending too much time right now when I know good and well that I’m just making trouble for myself down the road.  I’m an inherently lazy person, so I should have come to this conclusion way before now.

So, this means that any future rough mixes I post here will be *really* rough.  Also, it should mean that I don’t worry too much about where everything is going to fit in the mix until I have something to worry about.

Still, it’s pretty fun playing around with just the bass and drums.  I’ve just got to resist the urge to tweak unnecessarily – it’s ultimately a waste of time, and that’s a commodity in short supply these days.

Gear Hounding

Production

I bought an SM57 today so I can do that thing I said I wished I could do in the previous post.  I’m going to have to get creative with my mic stands, because I only have  a clip (a borrowed clamp-style shock mount, actually) that’ll fit one of those condensers for the overheads.

I am not above using duct tape.

Laying Foundations

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I wanted to make a Biblical reference here about building your house upon the rock, but there’s nothing like a little blasphemy to really work the jinx.  It’s an apt metaphor though, because the more solid your foundation, the more stable everything you pile on top will be.  In the case of  most of these songs, the foundation is the drums.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve played with some really amazing drummers.  Kevin Lawrence is going to be handling the drums on this album.

Kevin has been playing drums since he was 3, though I imagine he was beating on the rails of his crib in perfect 4/4 time prior to that.  His parents are both musicians, so he grew up in an environment that fostered his gift, and it shows.  We’ve played together for years now, and I’m still amazed at the things he’s able to do, and the relative ease with which he does them.  I am very glad he’s a part of this project.

We’ve been practicing the songs live, to get the feel right, and we’ve started tracking drums.  So far, we’ve just done some preliminary recording tests to see how everything is going to sound.  I’m a little limited in what I’m able to do based on the equipment I have at my disposal, but I’m making do with what I have.  Frankly, I’m not sure I have the skill to handle much more than what I have anyway.

The heart of my drum recording setup is a Fostex MR-8HD I’ve borrowed from my friend, James.  I’m able to record 4 simultaneous tracks with this, and the sound quality is very good, all things considered.  I’m using a couple of Nady CM90s as overheads, a Nady SCM800 on the snare, and a Realistic dynamic mic on the kick drum.  I’ve experimented the most with the kick.  I normally put the mic inside the kick drum, pointed towards the beater pad, but I think I like how it’s sounding when I move the mic out of the drum about a foot away, pointed back through the sound hole towards the beater pad.  I’m getting a little more of the breathy “poom” sound of the kick.  I was just getting the “thud” with the mic inside the drum.

Hooray for onomatopoeia!!

I was a little concerned initially about using a condenser mic on the snare, but I didn’t have a whole lot of choice, as that’s all I have.  I tried to borrow a Shure SM57, but my personal music store, James, had fried his on a previous misadventure with phantom power.  Apparently you plug in dynamic mics *before* you turn on the phantom power.  The scm800 has performed pretty well, though it still comes close to pegging the meter on the recorder, even with the gain turned all the way down.  The sound I’m getting is pretty good, so I’m just rolling with it.

If I had another mic to use on the snare, I’d use the scm800s as overheads, because that seems to be where the bulk of my sound is coming from – the overheads.  I’m using the kick and snare mics to isolate and shape the sounds of those two drums, so not much else comes from them once I start using the eq after the fact.

Right now, we haven’t done any “final” takes of any of the songs.  We’re still testing.  Here are a couple of work in progress test recordings.

Reliable – You can hear me playing guitar in the background – bleeding through the overheads.  Again, we knew these weren’t going to be usable takes, so I just played along.  When Kevin is tracking, he does it solo – without a click track even.   It’s frightening, really.  This is from our first night of recording with the MR-8HD.

032305 – This is a song that’s not yet finished, and we were just looping a couple of parts for practice, and to learn what’s currently there.  Also, the part Kevin is playing doesn’t actually work with the bass line I’ve got written for this, so it’s going to need to be changed.  I’m preserving it here because it’s ridiculous in its awesomeness.  This is from our second session with the MR-8HD.For a chance to win more Personalised Hoodies from PML, just like this post and share it on your facebook page!

And so it begins

Production

I’ve decided to record an album. Actually, I’ve decided to record several albums, but I’m going to start with one. I am a slave to inertia though, so I’m easing myself into this. I’ve done the one-man-band thing in the past, and that usually means I only have myself to blame when things don’t turn out like I’d hoped.

This time will be different.

Basically, I’m assembling the Dan Taylor Supergroup.  I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of playing with a lot of really talented musicians over the years, and this is going to be a love-letter to them in many ways. I’ll write more about each of my special guests at some point, but for now I’ll just say that they’re each selected because of what they can do, and mainly it’s what I can’t.

They complete me.

This first album is going to be a selection of “standards” – songs I’ve had for years that I felt would benefit from this sort of treatment. My hope is that by writing about the process in a public manner, I’ll accomplish two things – I’ll think a little more about what I’m doing, and I’ll be shamed into finishing the thing if I get slack.

So, this is how it’s going to be then? I guess it is.