Week 8, Glitter and Stone

The eighth song out is called Glitter and Stone. YouTube link for iPhone

This was a fun one.

It’s another song written in the good old standard tuning. It’s a simple song and I kept it pretty simple. There is one guitar track throughout, and then a second guitar track comes in at the first break. The two guitar tracks and the bass track were recorded onto the iPhone using the custom break-out cable and an Audix dynamic mic. I wanted a bigger drum sound for this song so I went back to recording the drums straight into Reaper on the laptop. I found myself backed against the wall again this week, having not been able to get the drum takes in by Sunday evening, so I had to throw together a three-mic setup using one Audio Technica overhead mic, the AKG D112 on the kick drum, and I moved the Rode NTK tube condenser out about four feet in front of the kit just a little higher than the top of the kick. I think the drums ended up sounding all right considering the time crunch. There are two vocal tracks, recorded using just the iPhone’s internal mic.

Last week, Fred asked if I used a pop filter when I use the iPhone mic to record vocals. I don’t, even though I have a perfectly expensive Stedman pop filter collecting dust upstairs. It took some trial and error though to avoid the air-related issues that are pretty exaggerated when you sing straight into the iPhone like you would a normal dynamic mic. The trick is to treat the mic the way it was made to work: I usually hold the phone in my hand to one side of my face with the mic pointing toward my voice about six inches away. I try to play around with it and it’s tricky to make sure that you keep a consistent location throughout. The mic is a really sensitive condenser that seems to maintain a good amount of gain at around a foot or so. I’ve also had good results holding the phone around my chin pointing up toward my mouth. It’s the same concept, but a little harder to train yourself to not point your mouth down toward the mic.

All of the tracks minus the drums were again recorded on the iPhone using the MultiTrack iPhone app. It’s a very stable 16-track recorder developed by Harmonicdog. As always, everything was mixed and tweaked using Reaper.

I hope everyone has a fantastic Halloween. No fancy parties for me this year. I’ll be happily hanging with the wife and the two-year-old who has a perfectly good elephant costume…we’ll see if he agrees to wear it, it’s day-to-day. I may be required to be an elephant too.

3 Comments to Week 8, Glitter and Stone

Fred
October 26, 2009

Bravo! This is my favorite so far. I like the song itself quite a bit. Your electric guitar work is great and your voice blends well with with the rest of the mix. I liked the harmony you threw in too.

Thanks for the vocal mic tips. I am about ready to record a few of my songs with Multitrack and may try importing a stereo wave file with a rhythm track I put together for one of them. I will try using the iPhone mic on my voice before I try the Mikey and then a dynamic through the breakout cable. I also want to try putting a condenser mic through an old Art MP tube preamp that’s in my closet and running the output into the breakout cable.

One of these weeks you have to include a drum solo…..

Have a great Halloween and good luck with your son wearing the costume. Our oldest son at age 3 or 4 freaked out when we started putting it on, even though he had picked it out. The compromise: He carried it on a hangar and showed it at every house.

Fred

alex
November 4, 2009

Hey, I have a I phone and I just tried to record one of my songs on the multi track, I wanted to see what kind of quality you could get, but where can we listen to one of your song, I just can’t find it on this page, weird…

BTW good idea for the project, I like this, I tried myself to make 8 good songs for a small album

alex

project52
November 10, 2009

Hi Alex. Sorry that it took a little while to get back to you on this. There are a couple of reasons that you might not be able to see or play the songs from the blog. The player that I use is hosted by http://www.soundcloud.com, probably your first step should be to visit their site and see if you have any problems there. It is a flash player, and as such, unfortunately won’t play on an iPhone. I’m still working on including an iPhone option – either through YouTube or by using a streaming podcast player. I promise to have that up as soon as possible. I would check to make sure you have flash working on your computer and then if nothing else works, please feel free to visit the Developer MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/developermusic – I may be a week behind at times, but I have most of the songs hosted there as well. Let me know how all of this works out. I’ll find some way to get you the songs if I have to come to France and play them for you live (that’s probably not the most feasible option).

Leave a comment