Week 30, Spinning

YouTube link for iPhone

I’m going to keep the next couple of posts brief so that I can focus on some exciting developments that are coming soon, including the remastering and release of Project 52, Volume 2 (weeks 14 – 26).

The first major step along the way was taken on Friday, where I made the most of having a day off from work by finishing a construction project to completely revamp my home studio, and I recorded the drums for this week’s song plus the next three weekly songs (writing four songs this week was huge, too). To top it off, I had a great business lunch with David Bernabo, my partner in Woolslayer & Main Productions, to plan out our Web site. We need to get the site up and running before the release of “Rock of the Dead“, an amazing looking zombie-themed video game from our friends at Epicenter Studios, on which we were asked to produce a bunch of songs.

This week’s song, “Spinning,” is a pretty straight-up pop/rock number. It’s a good old bass, drums, and guitar song, written in standard tuning. The drums were recorded in Reaper using the same six-mic setup as last week. The guitars, bass, and vocals were recorded into my iPhone using the MultiTrack app. The guitar and bass were performed on my Orange Crush 30R and miked using the custom break-out cable (discussed in Week 2). The vocals were recorded using the iPhone’s built in mic. 

The current song of the week is available as a free download using the SoundCloud player, and as always thanks for stopping by and letting me know what you think of my weekly craziness.

Tags: bandcamp, Cockos, Corey Layman, David Bernabo, developer, Epicenter Studios, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, phone-fi, Pittsburgh, podcast, Project 52, Rock of the Dead, Woolslayer and Main

Week 12, On the Rise

This week’s song is called On the RiseYouTube link for iPhone

You’ll notice above that I’m finally making good on a request – to make the songs listenable from an iPhone. I know that it’s been a long time coming, and I appreciate your patience. I have the four most recent songs up now, and I’ll keep trying to add older songs as I have time. I would highly recommend listening while your phone is on a wifi connection – the quality of the audio gets pretty low otherwise.

I’m really happy about this one. It’s a good old rock song. The guitar is tuned to drop-D and the amps are turned to 11… well not really. I actually had to keep the amp pretty quiet because my kid was sleeping. How’s that for the rock n’ roll lifestyle? The mean guitar tone that you hear is a result of running my Dean Evo guitar through the Tonebone tube distortion pedal which is made by Radial, and then through the Orange Crush 30R. I initially wrote the song with just the verse and chorus parts, but once I dialed up that crunchy guitar sound, I couldn’t help fooling around with it until I came up with the riff for the bridge/solo part that the song opens and ends with.

I recorded the two guitar tracks and the bass track in one sitting using an Audix dynamic mic into the custom break-out cable for the iPhone, and tracked into Harmonicdog’s  MultiTrack iPhone app. I’m working around MultiTrack’s lack of a metronome (I’ve been assured that it’s in an update just around the corner) by settling on a speed before I start recording a song, and then I make a simple dummy drum track in Propellerhead’s Reason software and then upload it into MultiTrack. That’s a little bit more involved than just setting up a metronome in the app, but it’s worked well enough so far.

The drums and vocals were recorded directly into Reaper on my laptop. This was the first time that I recorded the vocals using anything other than the iPhone. I used my Rode NTK tube mic. Of the mics that I own, it’s my favorite for vocals. The vocals are pretty up front in this mix. I think you can get a good sense of the Rode’s character. The drums were recorded with the same four-mic setup that I’ve used in previous weeks.

I ended up not using the iPhone for vocals and drums on this track for no other reason than convenience. That’s really been the reason I’ve used the iPhone so often on songs – because it’s quick to set up and easy to use. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my little studio room this week frantically trying to make deadlines for a video game soundtrack that my friend David Bernabo and I have been working on. We’ve been slowly putting together a production studio called Woolslayer and Main, where to-date we’ve composed a soundtrack for a Wii Ware game called Critter Round-up and a song for a Delaware TV commercial spoofing the Ghost Busters theme song, called Couch Busters. Right now we’re working on songs for a game by Epicenter Studios – the same folks who were kind enough to hire us for Critter Round-up. I think it’s going to be an awesome game, but unfortunately I’m not allowed to tell you a thing about it. You’ll have to stay tuned. It would’ve been silly for me to ditch the studio in favor of the iPhone when the studio was already up and running, and I was all up in it.

I hope you enjoy the song. There’s not much more to say about it. It’s rock.

I have another short week ahead of me – I’ll be traveling back out to Philly for Thanksgiving with the in-laws. It’s going to be really tight getting songs up on time over the holidays, so I may revert to acoustic guitar and vocals for a couple weeks. I have to make sure to give myself plenty of time to work on the video game because, well, they’re paying us. I’m sure you understand. Thanks for all of the comments. I’m glad to hear from you. Feel free to keep sending in questions about iPhone recording. I’m happy to talk shop.

Tags: Assembly, Cockos, Corey Layman, Couch Busters, Critter Round-up, David Bernabo, Dean Evo, developer, Epicenter Studios, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, Orange Crush 30r, Pittsburgh, Propellerhead, Radial, Reason, Rode NTK, Soundtrack, tone bone, Wii, Wii Ware, Woolslayer and Main