Week 7, For No One

This week’s song is called For No One. YouTube link for iPhone

I wanted to save myself from exhaustion and tried to get back to the low-fi concept that I started with. Well, with 14 tracks recorded I only partially achieved that goal.

Here’s how it breaks down:

I started out with two acoustic guitar tracks panned wide that I recorded using the Blue Mikey. There are two electric guitar tracks – both were recorded using the custom break-out cable to mic my Orange practice amp. I added three silly rhythm tracks with the Mikey and whatever I could find laying around. Those are pretty low in the mix now, but if you listen for them you can pick them up.

Next I took a shot at recording drums using the Mikey. I’d read that people were having mixed results using it for high-volume live music, but I’m not the loudest drummer in the world and I figured I’d give it a go and see how it turned out. It worked well enough for what was supposed to be a low-fi song. I’m happy to know that it works because it saves me precious time. I actually have two mostly identical drum takes running on this song for no good reason. They’re panned just a little bit and you can pick out the different tracks as everything falls apart at the end. I’ll keep messing around with drums through the Mikey and see if I can’t find a way to get a great drum sound using the iPhone. I’d be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on how this one came out.

Finally, I added four vocal tracks using just the iPhone mic. The bass track was the usual setup – micing my practice amp with a dynamic mic through the break-out cable. Mixing and production was done using Reaper.

The song itself was written in good old drop-D tuning. It looks like maybe next week will mark my first song using standard tuning. I’m really not that much of a tuning geek, but for some reason it took me two months to get back to basics.

For the second week I recorded everything into MultiTrack, the 16-track iPhone app by Harmonicdog that is really great and is only going to get better. I managed to pull this one off without a metronome, which is promised to be forthcoming, but that’s not something I’ll be able to get away with too often.

Anyway, not a whole lot more to say about this one. Keep the comments coming. One from Chris last week was inquiring about a way to play the songs on your iPhone. I’ve been looking, but since phones are unable to use flash players, it really limits my options other than making the songs available as downloads. I’m not ready yet to post the songs up for download because I haven’t decided for sure what I want to do with the entire project when it’s all said and done. At minimum, I will look into having the mp3’s available for purchase, and maybe have a free mp3 of the month feature or something like that – I could even put up some stuff from my old bands and projects over the years…well thankfully I still have 45 weeks left to figure this all out. I would really like to release the entire collection in three or four volumes on a hard format as well. I have a lot of planning to do and would be happy to hear your thoughts on all of this stuff. Oh, and if anyone knows of a player out there that I could embed or use through WordPress that would work for the iPhone, let me know.

3 Comments to Week 7, For No One

Fred
October 19, 2009

Another intriguing song. The electric guitars and bass are sounding great from week to week. And your voice seems to be coming up in the mix! The fact you used the iPhone mics this week is impressive. How close are you to the phone when you sing? Can I assume you don’t use a pop filter?

As for Mikey and the drums, it would be great if one of these weeks you expose them in the mix for at least an intro or break. (Same goes for acoustic guitars–an intro with just the guitars using Mikey or the iPhone mics would be enlightening.) Then we could better evaluate the audio quality.

BTW, I posted a link to your blog over at the Audio Engineering forum that discusses its FIRE iPhone app. Someone was asking for a breakout cable, so I linked him to the plug you had designed. (FYI, there is a thread that is dumping on Mikey; Blue seems to be interested in finding out what is going on with high-volume music and clipping.)

Good luck this week,

Fred

Chris
October 19, 2009

Interesting about the Mikey clipping problem. Just as I was about to dump the money down for one. Not heard the track yet (on my iPhone ) but thought this link might interest you : http://deuced.net/files/shout-stream-wb/ where I’ve seen a WP plugin that uses a script to call iTunes as the media player to stream music. Might be of interest to help us road warriors?

Like the look of the 16track app but am still with 4Track for the mo. Especially as they will soon have integration with their instant drummer. Not sure I want to drop more money.

Will look forward to finding a PC to listen to this week’s track.

Cat
October 22, 2009

ooooooo Corey! I love this….the soft drudgy harmonies….It’s slightly Beatlesque… Yay!

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