Week 15, Clearing Up

Song number 15 is called Clearing UpYouTube link for iPhone

On Friday, I left the ground in Pittsburgh with every intention of carving out some time to write and record a song while I was visiting my sister in Denver so that all I would have to do is post it when I returned on Tuesday. I even went as far as copying my edition of Reaper onto a thumb drive to run on my sister’s laptop (yes, you can actually run the software right from your thumb drive!) When I got to my sister’s house and sat down at her piano, I knew that I wanted to take advantage of a rare opportunity to write and record something on it as I’m pretty sure that the only way I’d get a piano in my house is to build it in there. I had just enough time in between family fun to pound out a song, but as Tuesday morning rolled around, and we were only a couple hours away from taking off from Denver’s creepy airport, I had yet to record anything. So as my wife and my sister worked to get my kid ready for the trip, I nervously tried to get enough piano recorded to constitute a song. I admit to being out of shape  on the keys as it is, but in these circumstances my performance was doomed to be shaky at best. That said, I think the idea came through pretty well, and when I finally got a chance to put everything together, the song came out rather nice.

The sound of this one is reminiscent of one of my favorite bands, Idaho. Idaho started out as a rock band on Caroline Records in the early 90’s, fronted by Jeff Martin. For a quick introduction into his music, take a look at this video of Jeff performing the song “To Be the One” from the Idaho Web site.

“Clearing Up” is a simple song, so I kept the recording simple. I used the Blue Mikey with my iPhone sitting on top of the piano – there was little time to mess around with placement. I doubled the piano track and EQed the low-end out on the first track and left just the low frequencies on the second. I’ve been experimenting with this technique since getting a tip from Joe, the patriarch of my favorite lunchtime and coffee haunt, Verde Good Beans in downtown Pittsburgh. You can hear the effect in this song a bit as I played around with some fading between the tracks at the beginning and end of the song – it starts out bright and then slowly rounds out into bassy piano as the song fades out. The guitar sounds consist of a few acoustic takes of two-note variations within the songs chords, and then I added a couple of delays to bring out that ambient slow feedback sound.

I recorded the vocals with the good old iPhone mic and as usual, I recorded everything into the MultiTrack app and mixed it all up in Reaper. I just got the word that Multitrack version 1.1 was submitted to Apple for approval. It looks to be a big step up from an already solid recording app, and I’ll make quick use of the built-in metronome and the support for stereo recording. It will be interesting to see how the Mikey sounds in stereo.

Thanks everyone for being patient as my releases have been pushed later into the week. I should have more free time in the coming weeks, so I’ll try to work my way back to Monday releases. Good news on the publishing front: cover art for Volume 1 is complete, and I’ve made the arrangements to have digital downloads for sale on iTunes and other stores in a number of weeks. I’d like to go back and master all of the songs together, get them out there for sale, and then I’ll get to work on the prospects for physical release (hopefully on vinyl).

1 Comment to Week 15, Clearing Up

Jim
December 18, 2009

You are truly inspiring. I like the music and love the technique. Thanks to you i discovered MultiTrack and am having a great time with it. I’m using a Belkin TuneTalk stereo mic. It probably isn’t as good as the Blue Mickey, but it has three very nice features. 1) it has a stereo mini input for an external mic or other instruments. I’m using that with a Pocket POD to record all electric guitars and bass. No amp needed, no mics, and no noise late a night. 2) It has an Auto gain switch that is good for quite inputs at a distance and adds some compression. Usually best to avoid it, but once in a while its handy. 3) It has a USB jack so the iPhone can be on a charger while recording. I find recording and having a plugin mic runs the battery down pretty fast.

Again, thanks for the inspiration. Try a Pocket POD, or better yet, a POD XT or X3. They’re bigger, but not that much, and do have some better sounds. The Pocked POD is based on the older POD 2.0 models. Some of these are pretty good though.

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