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.

4 Comments to Week 6, Pushing It

Jenny
October 15, 2009

Me likey – it’s a lot more mellow than the previous ones.

Chris
October 17, 2009

It would be really helpful if you could post your songs in an iPhone friendly format. As I’ve iPhone plays a fairly major role, I’d have thought you’d expect a degree of iPhone safari visits. Thing is, your tunes can’t be listened to that way (and the way I do most of my browsing). Purely sefish request, sorry, but does mean I struggle to get to listen each week.

Brooke
October 20, 2009

I’m thinking this might be my favorite one yet.

Cat
October 22, 2009

Speaks to the sweet side…makes me feel safe and curious…I like this very much

Leave a comment